Maurice Merleau-Ponty quotes

We know not through our intellect but through our experience. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
Language transcends us and yet, we speak. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Thinking which displaces, or otherwise defines, the sacred has been called atheistic, and that philosophy which does not place it here or there, like a thing, but at the joining of things and words, will always be exposed to this reproach without ever being touched by it. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The body is our general medium for having a world. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Thought without language, says Lavelle, would not be a purer thought; it would be no more than the intention to think. And his last book offers a theory of expressiveness which makes of expression not "a faithful image of an already realized interior being, but the very means by which it is realized.”. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and "gives the whole show away.” The seducer and the politician, who live in the dialectic and have a feeling and instinct for it, try their best to keep it hidden. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
[The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
Lichtenberg ... held something of the following kind: one should neither affirm the existence of God nor deny it. ... It is not that he wished to leave certain perspectives open, nor to please everyone. It is rather that he was identifying himself, for his part, with a consciousness of self, of the world, and of others that was "strange” (the word is his) in a sense which is equally well destroyed by the rival explanations. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The philosopher will ask himself ... if the criticism we are now suggesting is not the philosophy which presses to the limit that criticism of false gods which Christianity has introduced into our history. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it's caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But, because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one "to have his passion as a profession.”. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness [...] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find [...] a being which immediately recognises itself, [...] and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Philosophy is in history, and is never independent of historical discourse. But for the tacit symbolism of life it substitutes, in principle, a conscious symbolism; for a latent meaning, one that is manifest. It is never content to accept its historical situation. It changes this situation by revealing it to itself. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The function [of objective thinking] is to reduce all phenomena which bear witness to the union of subject and world, putting in their place the clear idea of the object as in itself and of the subject as pure consciousness. It therefore severs the links which unite the thing and the embodied subject, leaving only sensible qualities to make up our world (to the exclusion of the modes of appearance which we have described), and preferably visual qualities, because these give the impression of being autonomous, and because they are less directly linked to our body and present us with an object rather than introducing us into an atmosphere. But in reality all things are concretions of a setting, and any explicit perception of a thing survives in virtue of a previous communication with a certain atmosphere. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
De Lubac discusses an atheism which means to suppress this searching, he says, "even including the problem as to what is responsible for the birth of God in human consciousness.”. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty