Top 90 Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The body is our general medium for having a world.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

2. “We know not through our intellect but through our experience.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

3. “The flesh is at the heart of the world.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

4. “Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument. And when we wish to move about, we do not move the body as we move an object.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

6. “Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

7. “Language transcends us and yet we speak.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

8. “We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

9. “The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

10. “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

11. “I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

12. “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

13. “My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

14. “The world is nothing but ’world-as-meaning.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

15. “I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

16. “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

17. “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.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

18. “I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

19. “Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

20. “The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

21. “The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

22. “Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and gives the whole show away. The seducer and the politician, who live in the dialectic and have a feeling and instinct for it, try their best to keep it hidden.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

23. “Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

24. “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

25. “Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

26. “To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

27. “Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

28. “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.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

30. “Everything is science and everything is philosophy.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

31. “It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

32. “We situate ourselves in ourselves and in the things, in ourselves and in the other, and at the point where, by a sort of chiasm, we become the others and we become the world.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

33. “It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

34. “The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

35. “This passage from the indeterminate to the determinate, this continuous taking up again of its own history in the unity of a new sense, is thought itself.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

36. “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 imaginary...”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

37. “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.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

38. “Personal life, expression, knowledge, and history advance obliquely, and not directly, toward ends or toward concepts. That which is sought too deliberately is not obtained.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

39. “To see the object is to plunge into it.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

40. “Rather than a mind and a body, man is a mind with a body, a being who can only get to the truth of things because its body is, as it were, embedded in those things.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

42. “Each one of us knows for his own part that the world as it is, is unacceptable.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

43. “There is an adherence, a strange kinship between the human and the animal... of the animal as variant of humanity and of humanity as variant of animality.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

44. “The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

45. “There is no universal clock, but local histories take form beneath our eyes, and begin to regulate themselves, and haltingly are linked to one another and demand to live, and confirm the powerful in the wisdom which the immensity of the risks and the consciousness of their own disorder had given them. The world is more present to itself in all its parts than it ever was.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

46. “There is an intemporal which works on the inside of time, which is, rather, omnitemporal.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

48. “The imaginary is lodged in the world.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

49. “History flows neither from the past nor to the future alone: it reverses its course and, when you get right down to it, flows from all the presents.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

50. “How do we know that it refers to the past? That is the real problem of memory.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty