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Maurice Merleau-Ponty QUOTES

41 " Language transcends us and yet we speak. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , Phenomenology of Perception

42 " 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 , Phenomenology of Perception

43 " To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty

44 " 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. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , L'Œil et l'Esprit

45 " 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. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , Phenomenology of Perception

46 " 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 though them, all the rest. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , Phenomenology of Perception

47 " 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. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , Phenomenology of Perception

48 " We will arrive at the universal not by abandoning our particularity but by turning it into a way of reaching others, by virtue of that mysterious affinity which makes situations mutually understandable. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty

49 " The world and I are within one another. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty

50 " If this world is a poem, it is not because we see the meaning of it at first but on the strength of its chance occurrences and paradoxes. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Merleau-Ponty QUOTES

51 " The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty

52 " If every statement is incomplete and every expression is situated upon a silent tacit comprehension, then it must be that things are said and are thought by a Speech and by a Thought which we do not have but which has us. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty

53 " How do we know that it refers to the past? That is the real problem of memory. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty

54 " There is nothing to be seen beyond our horizons, but other landscapes and still other horizons, and nothing inside the thing but other smaller things. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , Phenomenology of Perception

55 " Everything that I know about the world, even through science, I know from a perspective that is my own or from an experience of the world without which scientific symbols would be meaningless. The entire universe of science is constructed upon the lived world, and if we wish to think science rigorously, to appreciate precisely its sense and its scope, we must first awaken that experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression. Science neither has, nor ever will have the same ontological sense as the perceived world for the simple reason that science is a determination or an explanation of that world.

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Scientific perspectives … always imply, without mentioning it, that other perspective - the perspective of consciousness - by which a world first arranges itself around me and begins to exist for me. To return to the things themselves is to return to this world prior to knowledge, this world of which knowledge always speaks, and this world with regard to which every scientific determination is abstract, signitive, and dependent, just like geography with regard to the landscape where we first learned what a forest, a meadow, or a river is. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , Phenomenology of Perception

56 " We are caught in a secret history, in a forest of symbols. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty

57 " Perhaps the truth is simply that one would need many lives to enter each realm of experience with the total abandon it demands. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , Signs

58 " A regime which is nominally liberal can be oppressive in reality. A regime which acknowledges its violence might have more genuine humanity. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty

59 " The world and reason are not problems; and though we might call them mysterious, this mystery is essential to them, there can be no question of dissolving it through some ‘solution,’ it is beneath the level of solutions. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty

60 " Revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , Adventures of the Dialectic