Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“The body is our general medium for having a world.”

“We know not through our intellect but through our experience.”

“Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning.”

“True philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world.”

“The world is not what I think, but what I live through.”

“Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of 'I think that' but of 'I can'.”

“I am not in front of my body, I am in my body, or rather I am my body.”

“We must not, therefore, wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive.”

“The painter 'takes his body with him,' says Valéry. Indeed we cannot imagine how a mind could paint.”

“My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven.”

“History is other people.”

“In short, the world is not what I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible.”

“The thing is inseparable from a person perceiving it, and can never be actually in itself because its articulations are those of our very existence.”

“Language is not an instrument that I can use, it is a dimension of my being in the world.”

“Scientific thinking, a thinking which looks on from above, and thinks of the object-in-general, must return to the 'there is' which underlies it.”

“To be a consciousness is to be engaged in the world.”

“Vision is the brain's way of touching.”