Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes

That which is cannot be true.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

Words are men's daughters, but God's sons are things.

Is perception equivalent to existence?

Because of its concrete content, sense-certainty immediately appears as the richest kind of knowledge, indeed a knowledge of infinite wealth for which no bounds can be found, either when we reach out into space and time in which it is dispersed, or when we take a bit of this wealth, and by division enter into it. Moreover, sense-certainty appears to be the truest knowledge ... but, in the event, this very certainty proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth. All that it says about what it knows is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing.

Being that can be understood is language.

The mirror is believed the way a poem is believed. It's believed because it's there.

Beyond positive and negative, what is Reality?

Well, sir, if things are real, they’re there all the time." "Are they?" said the Professor; and Peter did not quite know what to say.

To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations.~ The suggestion that truth~ is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own.

Let us affirm what seems to be the truth, that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be.

There is no frontier between being and appearing.

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.

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

I try to find the picture, not create it.

We have the notion that we exist but we have no way to prove it. 'I am' is the closest foundation we can get.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

The world is real. Consciousness is the illusion.

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

Life is an illusion. I am held together in the nothingness by art.

Yet, the Universe is real enough to the conscious beings in it, which are as unreal as it is itself.

All things in the world come from being. And being comes from non-being.

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

I think that reality exists and that it's knowable.

I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself.