Ponty Quotes & Sayings

The thing can never be separated from someone who perceives it; nor can it ever actually be in itself because its articulations are the very ones of our existence, and because it is posited at the end of a gaze or at the conclusion of a sensory exploration that invests it with humanity. To taking up or the achievement by us of an alien intention or inversely the accomplishment beyond our perceptual powers and as a coupling of our body wit the things. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

I called the great French violinist Jean-Luc Ponty and I said 'So, who's the new cat? Who's got the stuff? And he said Zach Brock. — Stanley Clarke

We know not through our intellect but through our experience. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

This also means that philosophy itself must not take itself as established in the truths it has managed to utter, that philosophy is an ever-renewed experiment of its own beginning, and finally, that radical reflection is conscious of its own dependence on an unreflected life that is its initial, constant, and final situation. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

We might say that we perceive the things themselves, that we are the world that thinks itself
or that the world is at the heart of our flesh. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Even those who have desired to work out a completely positive philosophy have been philosophers only to the extent that, at the same time, they have refused the right to install themselves in absolute knowledge. They taught not this knowledge, but its becoming in us, not the absolute but, at most, our absolute relation to it, as Kierkegaard said. What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one to have his passion as a profession. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

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

To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

How do we know that it refers to the past? That is the real problem of memory. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

What resists phenomenology within us--natural being, the 'barbarian' source Schelling spoke of--cannot remain outside phenomenology. The philosopher must bear his shadow, which is not simply the factual absence of future light. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

The world and I are within one another. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

[The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis — Maurice Merleau Ponty

An abyss is not nothing; it has environs & edges. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

We do not have a choice between purity and violence but between different kinds of violence. Inasmuch as we are incarnate beings, violence is our lot. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

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

We struggle with dream figures and our blows fall on living faces. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

We do not have the right to level out all experience into a single world. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

But the spectacle perceived does not partake of pure being. Taken exactly as I see it, it is a moment of my individual history, and since sensation is a reconstitution, it pre-supposes in me sediments left behind by some previous constitution, so that I am, as a sentient subject, a repository stocked with natural powers at which I am the first to be filled with wonder. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

The perception of other people and the intersubjective world is problematic only for adults. The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him. He has no awares of himself or of others as private subjectives, nor does he suspect that all of us, himself included, are limited to one certain point of view of the world. That is why he subjects neither his thoughts, in which he believes as they present themselves, to any sort of criticism. He has no knowledge of points of view. For him men are empty heads turned towards one single, self-evident world where everything takes place, even dreams, which are, he thinks, in his room, and even thinking, since it is not distinct from words. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

Said by whom? Said to whom? Not by a mind to a mind, but by a being who has body and language to a being who has body and language, each drawing the other by invisible threads like those who hold the marionettes-making the other speak, think, and become what he is but never would have been by himself. Thus things are said and are thought by a Speech and by a Thought which we do not have but which has us. There is said to be a wall between us and others, but it is a wall we build together, each putting his stone in the niche left by the other. Even reason's labors presuppose such infinite conversations. All those we have loved, detested, known, or simply glimpsed speak through our voice. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

We are caught in a secret history, in a forest of symbols. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

There is an intemporal which works on the inside of time, which is, rather, omnitemporal. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

True philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world. Maurice Merleau-Ponty — Simon Critchley

Recently someone asked, for whom does one write? That is a profound question. One should always dedicate a book. Not that one alters one's thoughts with a change of interlocutor, but because every word, whether we know it or not, is always a word with someone, which presupposes a certain degree of esteem or friendship, the resolution of a certain number of misunderstandings, the transcendence of a certain latent content and, finally the appearance of a part of the truth in the encounters we live. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

What is essential to the unconscious is that out life, precisely because it is not a consciousness of others, in indifferent balance, but a node of significations which are traces of events, consisting of excrescences and gaps, forms a baroque system. Exactly as an adult or elderly body has its dynamic, its privileged positions, its style of gestures, and its syntax, an implex has its wrinkles and its own balancing processes, and the unconscious is our practical schema, where everything is inscribed in shillings and pence. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

There is no more individuated being in the system. We only ever have to deal with families of trajectories. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

What do I bring to the problem of the same and the other? This: that the same be the other than the other, and identity difference of difference. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

To think is not having but not having. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

We will arrive at the universal not by abandoning our particularity but by turning it into a way of reaching others, by virtue of that mysterious affinity which makes situations mutually understandable. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

But if I did read, say, [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty, for instance, it always seemed to me that the parts that I understood in what he was talking about - and I read him because - well, he wrote a book, well, the Phenomenology of Perception [New York: Humanities Press, 1962]. And it seemed to me that perception had a lot do with how we take in art. — Robert Barry

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

Merleau-Ponty's painting inhabits the same rhetoric as early cinema: it makes the invisible visible, or rather it makes visibility visible; it forms from the thresholds of the visible and invisible world, an order, mode, or aesthetic of visuality. Not only of the small or fast, but of visibility as such. The visuality of the visible and the invisible is found in the mixture of the body and its world, of your body and your world, all your worlds, all your bodies in this world and all those others. Painting is the process by which the visuality of the visible and invisible is made manifest: "Painting mixes up all our categories in laying out its oneiric universe of carnal essences, of effective likenesses, of mute meanings." Each painting is a universal archive, a picture of the universe, a universal image - and like a dream. — Akira Mizuta Lippit

My past has its space, its paths, its nameplaces, and its monuments. Beneath the crossed but distinct orders of succession and simultaneity, beneath the train of synchronizations added onto line by line, we find a nameless network
constellations of spatial hours, of point-events. Should we even say 'thing,' should we say 'imaginary' or 'idea,' when each thing exists beyond itself, when each fact can be a dimension, when ideas have their regions? The whole description of our landscape and the lines of our universe, and of our inner monologue, needs to be redone. Colors, sounds, and things
like Van Gogh's stars
are the focal points and radiance of being. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

If every statement is incomplete and every expression is situated upon a silent tacit comprehension, then it must be that things are said and are thought by a Speech and by a Thought which we do not have but which has us. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

The negative principle is less identity-with-self than non-difference-with-self. This absence becomes a factor only by negation of its own negation. It is less a unity of the multiple in the living than an adhesion between the elements of the multiple. In a sense, there is only the multiple, and this totality that surges from it is not a totality in potential, but the establishment of a certain dimension. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

Any commemoration is also a betrayal. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

As a matter of principle, humanity is precarious: each person can only believe what he recognizes to be true internally and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind without already being caught up in certain relationships with others, which leads him to opt for a particular set of opinions. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

There is not identity, nor non-identity, or non-coincidence, there is inside and outside turning about one another. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Activity = passivity. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

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

Being established in my life, buttressed by my thinking nature, fastened down in this transcendental field which was opened for me by my first perception, and in which all absence is merely the obverse of a presence, all silence a modality of the being of sound, I enjoy a sort of ubiquity and theoretical eternity, I feel destined to move in a flow of endless life, neither the beginning nor the end of which I can experience in thought, since it is my living self who think of them, and since thus my life always precedes and survives itself. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Lichtenberg ... held something of the following kind: one should neither affirm the existence of God nor deny it ... It is not that he wished to leave certain perspectives open, nor to please everyone. It is rather that he was identifying himself, for his part, with a consciousness of self, of the world, and of others that was "strange" (the word is his) in a sense which is equally well destroyed by the rival explanations. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

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

Everything written has a political bearing, even in the case of a study on bees. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

Memory deforms reality, which nevertheless is formed as reality only in memory — Maurice Merleau Ponty

To abstain from violence toward the violent is to become their accomplice. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Everything is science and everything is philosophy. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

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

Each one of us knows for his own part that the world as it is, is unacceptable. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Very few philosophers have been anarchists — Maurice Merleau Ponty

This is an encounter between the human and the non-human, it is something like a behavior of the world. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

We speak of 'inspiration,' and the word should be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of Being. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

A regime which is nominally liberal can be oppressive in reality. A regime which acknowledges its violence might have more genuine humanity. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Evolution, life, physis, appear here as enveloping with regard to 'consciousness' of human knowledge. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

The Absolute is not only the Absolute, but also the dialectical movement of finite and infinite. The Absolute is such that it only ever appears to an other. Just as our intuition is an ek-stasis, by which we try to situate ourselves in the Absolute, so too must the Absolute leave itself and make itself in the world. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Philosophy is a will to confront human artifice with its outside, with Nature. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

At the end of '69 I did a gig with Jean Luc Ponty here in L.A. He was an electric violinist. — George Duke

If at the center and so to speak the kernel of Being there is an infinite infinite, every partial being directly or indirectly presupposes it, and is in return really or eminently contained in it. All the relationships we can have to Being must be simultaneously founded upon it. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

If myths, dreams and illusion are to be possible, the apparent and the real must remain ambiguous in the subject as in the object. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Moonlight and sunlight in our memory are presented before all else, not as sensory contents, but as a certain type of symbiosis, a certain manner that the outside has of invading us, a certain manner that we have of receiving it. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

What exists are not separated animals, but an inter-animality. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

The world and reason are not problems; and though we might call them mysterious, this mystery is essential to them, there can be no question of dissolving it through some 'solution,' it is beneath the level of solutions. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Man is hidden, well hidden, & this time we must make no mistake about it: this does not mean that he is there beneath a mask, ready to appear ... the situation is more serious: there are no faces underneath the masks, historical man has never been human, & yet no man is alone. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

The world and Being hold together only in movement; it is only in this way that all things can be together. Philosophy is a reminding of this being. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

Concepts for a philosopher are only nets for catching sense. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

How could it limit its investigation to one sector of reality? How could it help being pluralistic? How could it help finding the same truth everywhere? — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Nature gives us a dispersed finality. It is a demonology, full of supranatural forces, not one of which is supernatural. On this terrain of knowledge, one must be polytheist. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

A field tends of itself to multiply. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

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

We carry in our incarnate being the alphabet & the grammar of life, but this does not presuppose an achieved meaning either in us or in it. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

In advocating nonviolence one reinforces established violence. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

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

Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it. — Maurice Merleau Ponty