Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes
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The sensate body possesses an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis
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My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.
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As a matter of principle, humanity is precarious: each person can only believe what he recognizes to be true internally and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind without already being caught up in certain relationships with others, which leads him to opt for a particular set of opinions.
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The body is our general medium for having a world.
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True reflection presents me to myself not as idle and inaccessible subjectivity, but as identical with my presence in the world and to others, as I am now realizing it: I am all that I see, I am an intersubjective field, not despite my body and historical situation, but, on the contrary, by being this body and this situation, and through them, all the rest.
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The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.
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The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own and one never does belong to two worlds at once.
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To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
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The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.'
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Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful... but also when it comes to happiness.
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The number and richness of man's signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary.
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The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.
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Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.
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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.
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It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one 'to have his passion as a profession.'
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Science manipulates things and gives up living in them. It makes its own limited models of things; operating upon these indices or variables to effect whatever transformations are permitted by their definition, it comes face to face with the real world only at rare intervals. Science is and always will be that admirably active, ingenious, and bold way of thinking whose fundamental bias is to treat everything as though it were an object-in-general - as though it meant nothing to us and yet was predestined for our own use.
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The flesh is at the heart of the world.
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Montaigne puts not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.
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Existence permeates sexuality and vice versa, so that it is impossible to determine, in a given decision or action, the proportion of sexual to other motivations, impossible to label a decision or act ‘sexual’ or ‘non-sexual’ . There is no outstripping of sexuality any more than there is sexuality enclosed within itself. No one is saved and no one is totally lost.
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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.'
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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.'
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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.
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I discover vision, not as a 'thinking about seeing,' to use Descartes expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can be another's gaze.
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We know not through our intellect but through our experience.