Maurice Merleau-Ponty quotes

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher, recognized as a leading figure in phenomenology and existentialism. His work explored perception, embodiment, and the relationship between consciousness and the world. He deeply influenced twentieth-century philosophy, psychology, and the arts. Here are 28 of his quotes:

Language transcends us and yet, we speak.

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.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The body is our general medium for having a world.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.

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.

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.”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.

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.

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.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one "to have his passion as a profession.”.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.”.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty