Maurice Merleau-Ponty World Quotations

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.

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.

The body is our general medium for having a world.

Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.

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.

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.

The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.

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.

The flesh is at the heart of the world.

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.

The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.