Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes

Through space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; through thought I comprehend the world.

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.

If the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought that we had a mind.

Being that can be understood is language.

I think that you really get what you recognize is in the universe.

It's surprising that the world is understandable to the extent that it is.

History is that form which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality.

There are some people who still don't understand. But I know by the end of my fulfillment they will.

... the daily world exists because we know how to hold its images; consequently, if one drops the attention needed to maintain those images, the world collapses

How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding ; How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile.

One who ”knows,” knows there is no need to discourse; knowing is enough

We see nothing till we truly understand it.

Freedom can never be comprehended, nor even can insight into it be gained.

Observing and understanding are two different things.

Understanding sometimes is not enough to explain something.

I don't think the world objectively exists the way we think it exists. There's a constant sort of storytelling process.

You should know better.ʺ ʺIʹve never known better,ʺ he countered. ʺYou should know that.

What one doesn't understand one doesn't possess.

Consciousness of a fact is not knowing it: if it were, the fish would know more of the sea than the geographers and the naturalists.

Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the anxioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.

Explanations are clear but since no one to whom a thing is explained can connect the explanations with what is really clear, therefore clear explanations are not clear.

If one looks at a thing with the intention of trying to discover what it means, one ends up no longer seeing the thing itself, but of thinking of the question that is raised.

We are actually fourth dimensional beings in a third dimensional body inhabiting a second dimensional world!

A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.

Of the Logos which is as I describe it men always prove to be uncomprehending, both before they have heard it and when once they have heard it. For although all things happen according to this Logos, they [men] are like people of no experience, even when they experience such words and deeds as I explain, when I distinguish each thing according to its constitution and declare how it is; but the rest of men fail to notice what they do after they wake up just as they forget what they do when asleep.