Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a 20th-century French phenomenologist and one of the most original philosophers of the post-war French tradition. His 1945 work Phenomenology of Perception developed an account of the lived body as the primary site of experience, against both empiricist and intellectualist accounts of perception. The quotes below are attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, organized by topic.
Browse Maurice Merleau-Ponty by topic
Maurice Merleau-Ponty on Death
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“By becoming the pure subject who knows the world objectively, man ultimately realizes that absolute consciousness with respect to which the body and individual existence are no longer anything but objects; death is deprived of meaning. Reduced to the status of object of consciousness, the body could not be conceived as an intermediary between "things" and the consciousness which knows them.”
p. 204
Maurice Merleau-Ponty on God
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“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.””
In Praise of Philosophy(1963) | p. 45 -
“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.”
In Praise of Philosophy(1963) | p. 46
Maurice Merleau-Ponty on Knowledge
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Attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
“We come to know the world through our body.”
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“[The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis”
The Visible and the Invisible , trans. A. Lingis (Evanston: 1968), p. 135 -
“Language transcends us and yet, we speak.”
p. 349 -
“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.”
p. 5 -
“Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.”
In Praise of Philosophy(1963) | p. 45
Maurice Merleau-Ponty on Life
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Attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
“Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning.”
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Attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
“The world is not what I think, but what I live through.”
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“Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.”
Signs , trans. R. McCleary (Evanston: 1964), p. 203
Maurice Merleau-Ponty on Mind
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Attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
“The body is the vehicle of being in the world.”
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Attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
“Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deliberate taking up of a position; it is the background from which all acts stand out.”
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Attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
“It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings.”
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“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.”
p. 8
Maurice Merleau-Ponty on Nature
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“The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.”
p. xi
Maurice Merleau-Ponty on Truth
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Attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
“Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or rather there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.”
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Attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
“The phenomenological world is not pure being, but the sense which is revealed where the paths of my various experiences intersect.”
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“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.”
In Praise of Philosophy(1963) | p. 47
Maurice Merleau-Ponty on Virtue
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“It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one “to have his passion as a profession.”
p. 4