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 More Quotes by Maurice Merleau-Ponty More Quotes From Maurice Merleau-Ponty The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him. Maurice Merleau-Ponty phenomenologybelievechildren 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. Maurice Merleau-Ponty perceptiondoemen 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 viewsmenlong 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. Maurice Merleau-Ponty motivationvicesdecision 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 doetwoorder My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think. Maurice Merleau-Ponty teachsurprisethinking It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations. Maurice Merleau-Ponty phenomenologyreservationsessence To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure. Maurice Merleau-Ponty obscureexplanationasks 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. Maurice Merleau-Ponty feelingstryinggiving [The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis. Maurice Merleau-Ponty bodywishart The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence. Maurice Merleau-Ponty foundationexistenceworld 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. Maurice Merleau-Ponty visionexpressionthinking 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. Maurice Merleau-Ponty humanitybelievethinking 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. Maurice Merleau-Ponty phenomenologyhistoricalreflection 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 giving-uprealthinking 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. Maurice Merleau-Ponty limitscriticismphilosophy Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man. Maurice Merleau-Ponty viewsmenmean The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning. Maurice Merleau-Ponty world 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. Maurice Merleau-Ponty philosophicalphilosophyhands Even those who have desired to work out a completely positive philosophy have been philosophers only to the extent that, at the same time, they have refused the right to install themselves in absolute knowledge. They taught not this knowledge, but its becoming in us, not the absolute but, at most, our absolute relation to it, as Kierkegaard said. What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement. Maurice Merleau-Ponty work-outignorancephilosophy
