Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Time
Understand
Development
Requiring
Moments
Hold
Developments
Order
Turn
Precarious
Past
Stage
Horizon
May
Since
Reached
Always
Turns
Possession
Never
Future
Fully
Bounded
Would
Moment
Understood
Postponed

More quotes by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Image
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 himself.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Image
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
Image
We know not through our intellect but through our experience.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Image
The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Image
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
Image
I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Image
I am not in front of my body, I am in it or rather I am it... If we can still speak of interpretation in relation to the perception of one's own body, we shall have to say that it interprets itself.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Image
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.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Image
The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Image
The body is our general medium for having a world.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Image
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
Image
I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Image
The flesh is at the heart of the world.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Image
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
Image
Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful... but also when it comes to happiness.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Image
Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Image
[The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Image
It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Image
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
Image
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