Quote

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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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
Keeps
Instants
Photograph
Forthwith
Open
Overtaking
Time
Overlapping
Metamorphosis
Closes
Destroys
Instant

More quotes by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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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.
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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.
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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 silence. the spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.
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To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
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We know not through our intellect but through our experience.
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It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.
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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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Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.
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The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.
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The flesh is at the heart of the world.
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I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
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It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.
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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.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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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
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The body is our general medium for having a world.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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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
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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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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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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
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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