116 Quotes by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

We are in the world, mingled with it, compromised with it.

We are human precisely insofar as we always intend a singularity across the thickness of our lives, insofar as we are grouped around this unique interior where there is no one, which is latent, veiled, and escapes from us always leaving behind in our hands truth which are like traces of its absence.

The imaginary is lodged in the world.

From now on the tasks of literature and philosophy can no longer be separated. When one is concerned with giving voice to the experience of the world and showing how consciousness escapes into the world, one can no longer credit oneself with attaining a perfect transparence of expression. Philosophical expression assumes the same ambiguities as literary expression, if the world is such that it cannot be expressed except in “stories” and, as it were, pointed at.

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.

To understand is to experience harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance – and the body is our anchorage in the world.

It has always been easy to hide violence with declarations of peace.

To think is not having but not having.

Behavior develops ‘in a spiral’... Every motor theme of embryonic life can be considered as a theme that will be elaborated at a higher level in postnatal life.