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Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin of silence, so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence. the spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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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.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense.
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.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty