“ 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
“ 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 proj… Maurice Merleau-Ponty
“ Science and philosophy have for centuries been sustained by unquestioning faith in perception. Perception opens a window on to things. This means that it is directed, quasi-teleologically, towards a *… Maurice Merleau-Ponty
“ The real is coherent and probable because it is real, not real because it is coherent... Maurice Merleau-Ponty
“ T)he philosopher is a perpetual beginner. This means that he accepts nothing as established from what men or scientists believe they know. This also means that philosophy itself is an ever-renewed exp… 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 aro… Maurice Merleau-Ponty
“ The word 'image' is in bad repute because we have thoughtlessly believed that a drawing was a tracing, a copy, a second thing, and that the mental image was such a drawing, belonging among our private… Maurice Merleau-Ponty
“ 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 i… 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 obvers… 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
“ 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… Maurice Merleau-Ponty
“ Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it sees and moves itself, it holds thi… Maurice Merleau-Ponty
“ It is no more natural and no less conventional to shout in anger or to kiss in love than to call a table 'a table'. Feelings and passional conduct are invented like words. Even those which like patern… 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
“ 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… Maurice Merleau-Ponty
“ 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, th… 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… Maurice Merleau-Ponty
