Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes

We don't all see the same way at all. Even if I'm sitting looking at you, there is always the memory of you as well. And a memory is now. So someone who's never met you before is seeing a different person. That's bound to be the case. We all see something different. I assume most people don't look very hard at anything.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.

There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man's spice-box seasons his own food.

People make their own reality. That was what Praxis had taught him years ago. A hundred people can witness the exact same event, and give two hundred and three different accountings of it.

The events of life have never fallen into the form of the short story or the form of the poem, or into any other form.Yourown consciousnessisthe only formyouneed.

I guess art is in the eye of the beholder.

You can take a picture of New York and one person looking at it will think it looks really depressing, frightening; and someone else will look at it and think of all the fun things you can do in New York. I think songs are kinda like that.

A reader is entitled to believe what he or she believes is consonant with the facts of the book. It is not unusual that readers take away something that is spiritually at variance from what I myself experienced. That's not to say readers make up the book they want. We all have to agree on the facts. But readers bring their histories and all sets of longings. A book will pluck the strings of those longings differently among different readers.

A man's own dinner is to himself so important that he cannot bring himself to believe that it is a matter utterly indifferent to anyone else.

I have intentions as a writer, but people - when they're listening to a track - will take from it what they interpret.

But men may construe things after their fashion, Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.

My external sensations are no less private to my self than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside... the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

Yes, I am letting my own experience color my answer, which is what experience is for.

Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication- after that it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it can not be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to ME, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

One's roused by this, another finds that fit: Each loves the play for what he brings to it.

People bring to what they see and feel, the inner weather of their souls and complexion of their minds.

Sometimes the situation is only a problem because it is looked at in a certain subjective, negative, ungrateful way.

I see a green tree. And to me it is green. And you would call the tree green also. And we would agree on this. But is the colour you see as green the same colour I see as green?

I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make.

The pleasure of life is according to the man that lives it, and not according to the work or place.

Each of us tends to think we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are - or as we are conditioned to see it.

I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.

It is not what things are objectively and in themselves, but what they are for us, in our way of looking at them, that makes us happy or the reverse.

"Don't believe me, don't believe yourself, and don't believe anybody else." Don't believe me, because what I say is only truth for me. Don't believe yourself, because most of the time what you tell yourself is only truth for you - especially when you tell yourself that you're not good enough, you're not intelligent enough, you're not beautiful enough - when you reject yourself before anybody else can reject you. And don't believe anybody else, because what they say is only truth for them.

It’s almost just a difference of mood as to whether I would describe myself one way or the other. I think I share that experience with most people.