Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes on Life
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a 20th-century French phenomenologist and one of the most original philosophers of the post-war French tradition. This page collects quotes attributed to Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the topic of life, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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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 -
“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