Quotes by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

About Maurice Merleau-Ponty:

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, and politics. He was on the editorial board of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine created by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1945.
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The destruction of sight, wherever the injuries be sustained, follows the same law: all colours are affected in the first place, and lose their saturation. Then the spectrum is simplified, being reduced to four and soon to two colours; finally a ...

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

The body is our general medium for having a world.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The perception of other people and the intersubjective world is problematic only for adults. The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him. He has no awares of himself or of others as private subjectives, no...

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

the real is coherent and probable because it is real, and not real because it is coherent...

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

Being established in my life, buttressed by my thinking nature, fastened down in this transcendental field which was opened for me by my first perception, and in which all absence is merely the obverse of a presence, all silence a modality of the bei...

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin [of silence], so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silenc...

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The destruction of sight, wherever the injuries be sustained, follows the same law: all colors are affected in the first place,and lose their saturation. Then the spectrum is simplified, being reduced to four and soon to two colors; finally a gre...

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The flesh is at the heart of the world.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

...the real is coherent and probable because it is real, not real because it is coherent...

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Humanity is not an aggregate of individuals, a community of thinkers, each of whom is guaranteed from the outset to be able to reach agreement with the others because all participate in the same thinking essence. Nor, of course, is it a single Being ...

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 number and richness of man’s signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imagina...

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 hims...

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Author Bio

  • NameMaurice Merleau-Ponty
  • DescriptionFrench phenomenological philosopher
  • BornMarch 14, 1908
  • DiedMay 3, 1961
  • CountryFrance
  • ProfessionPhilosopher