Top 90 Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

52. “The concept of Nature does not evoke only the residue of what had not been constructed by me, but also a productivity which is not ours, although we can use it – that is, an originary productivity that continues beneath the artificial creations of man. It both partakes of the most ancient, and is something always new.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

53. “There is already a kind of presence of the other in me.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

54. “To abstain from violence toward the violent is to become their accomplice.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

55. “There is nothing to be seen beyond our horizons, but other landscapes and still other horizons, and nothing inside the thing but other smaller things.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

56. “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.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

57. “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.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

58. “Matter is ‘pregnant’ with its form.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

59. “I rediscover the world – which I had distinguished from myself as a sum of things or of processes tied together through causal relations – ‘in myself’ as the permanent horizon of all of my thoughts and as a dimension in relation to which I never cease situating myself.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

60. “Violence is the common origin of all regimes. Life, discussion, and political choice occur only against a background of violence.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

61. “I do not believe that what one gives to the sciences is taken from philosophy.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

62. “Everything written has a political bearing, even in the case of a study on bees.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

63. “So it is fairly widely recognised that the relationship between human beings and things is no longer one of distance and mastery such as that which obtained between the sovereign mind and the piece of wax in Descartes’ famous description. Rather, the relationship is less clear-cut: vertiginous proximity prevents us both from apprehending ourselves as a pure intellect separate from things and from defining things as pure objects lacking in all human attributes.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

64. “Stiftung is not enveloping thought, but open thought, not the intended and Vorhabe of an actual center, but an ‘off-center’ which will be rectified, not the positing of an end, but the positing of a style, not a frontal grasp but a lateral divergence, algae brought back from the depths.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

65. “Two things are certain about freedom: that we are never determined and yet that we never change, that, retrospectively, we can always find in our past the anticipation of what we have become.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

66. “Instead of an intelligible world there are radiant nebulae separated by expanses of darkness.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

67. “In advocating nonviolence one reinforces established violence.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

68. “What we call ‘natural’ is frequently no more than bad theory.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

69. “Revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

70. “The idea of tradition is this double movement: being other in order to be the same, forgetting in order to conserve, producing in order to receive, looking ahead in order to receive the entire force of the past.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

71. “There is a kinship between the concepts of nature and radical contingency.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

72. “We must accept at the same time a historical and social explanation of psychoanalysis and a psychoanalysis of the history and social facts.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

73. “To think is not having but not having.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

74. “Phenomenological or existential philosophy assigns itself the task, not of explaining the world or of discovering its “conditions of possibility,” but rather of formulating an experience of the world, a contact with the world which precedes all thought about the world.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

75. “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.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

76. “If we want to both inhabit our body and know it, we must be simultaneously ourselves and another.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

77. “The wonderful thing about language is that it promotes its own oblivion.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

78. “We are in the world, mingled with it, compromised with it.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

80. “A science without philosophy would literally not know what it was talking about. A philosophy without methodological exploration of phenomena would end up with nothing but formal truths, which is to say, errors.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

81. “Consider an angry or a threatening gesture... I do not perceive the anger or the threat as a psychological fact hidden behind the gesture, I read the anger in the gesture. The gesture does not make me think of anger, it is anger itself... Everything happens as if the other person’s intention inhabited my body, or as if my intention inhabited his body... I understand the other person through my body, just as I perceive ‘things’ through my body.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

82. “There is a temporal style of the world, and time remains the same because the past is a former future and a recent present, the present an impending past and a recent future, the future a present and even a past to come; because, that is, each dimension of time is treated or aimed at as something other than itself and because, finally, there is at the core of time a gaze.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

83. “While listening to a piece of beautiful music: impressions that this movement which is beginning is already at its end, that it is going to have been, or sinking into the future that we hold as well as the past – though we cannot say exactly what it will be. Anticipated Retrospection – retrograde movement in futuro: it is descending toward me already made.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

84. “In modernity, it is not only works of art that are unfinished: the world they express is like a work which lacks a conclusion. There is no knowing, moreover, whether a conclusion will ever be added.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

85. “I am, as a sensing subject, full of natural powers of which I am the first to be filled with wonder. Thus I am not, to recall Hegel’s phrase, a ‘hole in being,’ but rather a hollow, or a fold that was made and that can be unmade.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

86. “Life is not a sort of quasi-interiority, it is only a fold, the reality of a process, as Whitehead would say, in observable up close.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

87. “Language realizes, by breaking the silence, what the silence wished and did not obtain.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

88. “There are several ways for a body to be a body, and several ways for consciousness to be consciousness.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

89. “To say that I have a visual field means that I have an access and an opening to a system of visible beings through my position, and that they are available to my gaze in virtue of a kind of primordial contact and by a gift of nature, without any effort required on my part. In other words, it means that vision is pre-personal.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

90. “Philosophy is not a hospital. If people are vertiginous and want to take medication against it, I don’t stop them, but I say: this is medication.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

91. “In order to really see the world, we must break with our familiar acceptance of it.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

92. “The ‘healthy’ man is not so much the one who has eliminated his contradictions as the one who makes use of them and drags them into his vital labors.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

93. “Being is not given but rather emerges over time.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

94. “To the extent that consciousness is only consciousness of something by allowing its wake to trail behind itself, and to the extent that, to think an object, consciousness must rely upon a previously constructed ‘world of thought,’ there is always a de personalization at the heart of consciousness.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

95. “There is the possible in the organism. The embryo is not simple matter, but matter which refers to the future.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty