116 Quotes by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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.

Freedom exists in contact with the world, not outside it.

Nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see.

Two things are certain about freedom: that we are never determined and yet that we never change, that, retrospectively, we can always find in our past the anticipation of what we have become.

Everything written has a political bearing, even in the case of a study on bees.

If we want to both inhabit our body and know it, we must be simultaneously ourselves and another.

We struggle with dream figures and our blows fall on living faces.

The origin of language is mythic; that is, there is always a language before language, which is perception.

So it is fairly widely recognised that the relationship between human beings and things is no longer one of distance and mastery such as that which obtained between the sovereign mind and the piece of wax in Descartes’ famous description. Rather, the relationship is less clear-cut: vertiginous proximity prevents us both from apprehending ourselves as a pure intellect separate from things and from defining things as pure objects lacking in all human attributes.