Quote

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

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Age: 53 †
Born: 1908
Born: March 14
Died: 1961
Died: May 3
Aesthetician
Art Theorist
Philosopher
Professor
Rochefort-sur-Mer
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty
Wish
Applies
Moving
Instrument
Hands
Object
Body
Instruments
Things
Objects
Like
Move
Hand
Inhabits
Space
Haunts

More quotes by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
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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.
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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.
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The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own and one never does belong to two worlds at once.
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Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful... but also when it comes to happiness.
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It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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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
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The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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[The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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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
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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
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The body is our general medium for having a world.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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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
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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
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I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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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.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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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
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My hold on the past and the future is precarious and my possession of my own time is always postponed until a stage when I may fully understand it, yet this stage can never be reached, since it would be one more moment bounded by the horizon of its future, and requiring in its turn, further developments in order to be understood.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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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