Signs Quotes

“Language signifies when instead of copying thought it lets itself be taken apart and put together again by thought. Language bears the sense of thought as a footprint signifies the movement and effort of a body. The empirical use of already established language should be distinguished from its creative use. Empirical language can only be the result of creative language. Speech in the sense of empirical language - that is, the opportune recollection of a preestablished sign – is not speech in respect to an authentic language. It is, as Mallarmé said, the worn coin placed silently in my hand. True speech, on the contrary - speech which signifies, which finally renders "l'absente de tous bouquets" present and frees the sense captive in the thing - is only silence in respect to empirical usage, for it does not go so far as to become a common noun. Language is oblique and autonomous, and if it sometimes signifies a thought or a thing directly, that is only a secondary power derived from its inner life. Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“Perhaps the truth is simply that one would need many lives to enter each realm of experience with the total abandon it demands.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“It has always been easy to hide violence with declarations of peace.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“The 'healthy' man is not so much the one who has eliminated his contradictions as the one who makes use of them and drags them into his vital labors.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“An abyss is not nothing; it has environs & edges.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“Any commemoration is also a betrayal.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“There is no universal clock, but local histories take form beneath our eyes, and begin to regulate themselves, and haltingly are linked to one another and demand to live, and confirm the powerful in the wisdom which the immensity of the risks and the consciousness of their own disorder had given them. The world is more present to itself in all its parts than it ever was.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“What one too deliberately seeks, he does not find; and he who on the contrary has in his meditative life known how to tap its spontaneous source never lacks for ideas and values.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“Perhaps it is essential to men to attain greatness in their works only when they do not look for it too hard.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“Some think that the painting does not so much express the meaning as the meaning impregnates the
painting.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“The negative has its positive side, the positive its negative, and it is precisely because each has its contrary within itself that they are capable of passing into one another, and perpetually play the role of warring brothers in history.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“A vision or an action that is finally free throws out of focus and regroups objects of the world for the painter and words for the poet.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“There is in all expression a spontaneity which will not take orders, not even those which I would like to give to myself.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“Bergson says that mystical experience need not wonder whether the source it puts us in contact with is God himself or his earthly delegation. It experiences the granted invasion of a being which 'can do immensely more than it can.' We must not even say an all-powerful being: Bergson says that the idea of the all is as empty as that of nothingness, and the possible for him remains the shadow of the real. Bergson's God is immense rather than infinite, or He is a qualitative infinite. He is the element of joy or love in the sense that water and fire are elements. Like sentient and human beings, He is a radiance, not an essence. Metaphysical attributes which seek to determine Him are, Bergson says, like all determinations, negations. Even if through some impossibility they became visible, no religious man would recognize the God he prays to in them. Bergson's God is, like the universe, a singular being, an immense this; and even in theology Bergson kept his promise of a philosophy fashioned for actual being and applying to it alone. If we indulge in imaginary computations we must admit, he says, that 'the whole could have been much better than it is.' No one can make someone's death a component of the best possible world. But not only are the solutions of classical theodicy false, the problems have no meaning in the order Bergson puts himself in--the order of radical contingency. Here it is not a question of the conceived world or a conceived God, but of the existing world and an existing God; and that within us which is acquainted with this order is beneath our opinions and our statements. No one will ever stop men from loving their life, no matter how miserable it may be. This vital judgment puts life and God on this side of arraignment as well as of justification. And if we insisted upon understanding how natura naturans had been able to produce a natura naturata in which it is not really realized, why creative effort has been at least provisionally arrested, what obstacle it has encountered and how an obstacle could be insurmountable for it, Bergson would agree that his philosophy does not answer this type of question. But he would also say that the reason why it does not is that it does not have to ask such questions. For in the last analysis his philosophy is not a genesis of the world--not even, as it narrowly missed being, 'integration and differentiation' of being--but the deliberately partial, discontinuous, almost empirical location of several foci of being.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“We must therefore say the same thing about language in relation to meaning that Simone de Beauvoir says about the body in relation to mind : it is neither primary nor secondary. No one has ever made the body simply a means or an instrument, or maintained for example that one can love by principles. And since it is no more true that the body loves all by itself, we may say that it does everything and nothing, that it is and is not ourselves. Neither end nor means, always involved in matters which go beyond it, always jealous nevertheless of its autonomy, it is powerful enough to oppose itself to any end which is merely deliberate, but it has none to propose to us if we finally tum toward it and consult it. Sometimes—and then we have the feeling of being ourselves—it lets itself be animated and becomes responsible for a life which is not simply its own. Then it is happy or spontaneous, and
we with it. Similarly, language is not meaning's servant, and yet it does not govern meaning. There is no subordination between them. Here no one commands and no one obeys. What we mean is not before us, outside all speech, as sheer signification, lt is only the excess of what we live over what has already been said.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“Mallarme himself was well aware that nothing would fall from his pen if he remained absolutely faithful to his vow to say everything without leaving anything
unsaid, and that he was able to write minor books only by giving up the Book which would dispense with all the others. The signification without any sign, the thing itself—that height of clarity—would be the disappearance of all clarity. And whatever clarity we can have is not at the beginning of language, like a golden age, but at the end of its effort.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“Hegel is the Museum. He is if you wish all philsophies, but deprived of their finiteness and power of impact, embalmed, transformed, he believes, into themselves, but really transformed into Hegel. We only have to see how a truth wastes away when it is integrated into different ones (how the Cogito, for example, in going from Descartes to
the Cartesians, becomes almost a listlessly repeated ritual) to agree that the synthesis does not effectively contain all past systems of thought, that it is not all that they have been, and finally that it is never a synthesis which is both "in and for itself"—that is, a synthesis which in the same movement is and knows, is what it knows, knows what it is, preserves and suppresses, realizes and destroys. If Hegel means that as the past becomes distant it changes into its meaning, and that we can trace an intelligible history of thought in retrospect, he is right; but on condition that in this synthesis each term remain the whole of the world at the date considered, and that in linking philosophies together
we keep them all in their place like so many open significations and let an exchange of anticipations and metamorphoses subsist between them. The meaning of philosophy is the meaning of a genesis. Consequently, it could not possibly be summed up outside of time, and it is still expression.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“Signs do not simply evoke other signs for us and so on without end, and language is not like a prison we
are locked into or a guide we must blindly follow; for what these linguistic gestures mean and gain us such complete access to that we seem to have no further need of them to refer to it finally appears at the
intersection of all of them.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“Saussure may show that each act of expression becomes significant only as a modulation of a general system of expression and only insofar as it is differentiated from other linguistic gestures. The marvel is that before Saussure we did not know anything about this, and that we forget it again each time we speak--to begin with when we speak of Saussure's ideas.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“One reason why the painter takes up his brush is that in one sense the art of painting still remains to be created...Painting is always something to be created.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“History... is the perpetual conversation carried on between all spoken words and all valid actions, each in turn contesting and confirming the other, and each recreating all the others.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“The dialectic is, Hegel said approximately, a movement which itself creates its course and returns to itself—and thus a movement which has no other guide but its own initiative and which nevertheless does not escape outside itself but cuts across itself again and confirms itself at long intervals. So the Hegelian dialectic is what we call by another name the phenomenon of expression, which gathers itself up and launches itself again through the mystery of rationality. And we would undoubtedly recover the concept of history in the true sense of the term lf we were to get used to modeling it after the example of the arts and language. For the fact that each expression is closely connected within one single order to every other expression brings about the junction of the individual and the universal. The central fact to which the Hegelian dialectic retums in a hundred ways is that we do not have to choose between the pour soi and the pour autrui, between thought according to us and according to others, but that at the moment of expression the other to whom I address myself and I who express myself are incontestably linked together.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“Christianity ls, among other things, the recognition of a mystery in the relations of man and God, which stems precisely from the fact that the Christian God wants nothing to do with a vertical relation of subordination. He is not simply a principle of which we are the consequence, a will whose instruments we are, or even a model of which human values are only the reflection. There is a sort of impotence of God without us, and Christ attests that God would not be God without becoming fully man. Claudel goes so far as to say that God is not above but beneath us—meaning that we do not find Him as a suprasensible idea, but as another ourself which dwells in and authenticates our darkness.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“The Museum's function, like the Library's, is not entirely beneficent. It certainly enables us to see dead productions scattered about the world and engulfed in cults or civilizations they sought to ornament as unified aspects of a single effort. In this sense our consciousness of painting as painting is based upon the Museum, But painting exists first of all in each painter who works, and it is there in a pure state, whereas the Museum compromises it with the somber pleasures of retrospection. One should go to the Museum as the painters go there, in the sober joy of work; and not as we go there, with a somewhat spurious reverence. The Museum gives us a thieves' conscience. We occasionally sense that these works were not after аll intended to end up between these morose walls, for the pleasure of
Sunday strollers or Monday "intellectuals." We are well aware that something has been lost and that this self-communion with the dead is not the true milieu of art—that so many joys and sorrows, so much anger, and so many labors were not destined to reflect one day the Museum's mournful light...The Museum adds a false prestige to the true value of the works by detaching them from the chance circumstances they arose from and making us believe that the artist's hand was guided from the start by fate. Whereas the style of each painter throbbed in his life like his heart beat, and was just what enabled him to recognize every effort which differed from his own, the Museum converts this secret, modest, non-deliberated, involuntary, and, in short, living historicity into official and pompous history.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“The unity of painting does not exist in the Museum alone; it exists in that single task which all painters are confronted with and which makes the situation such that one day they will be comparable in the Museum, and such that these fires answer one another in the night. The first sketches on the walls of caves set forth the world as "to be painted"
or "to be sketched" and called for an indefinite future of painting, so that they speak to us and we answer them by metamorphoses in which they collaborate with us. There are thus two historicities. One is ironic
or even derisory, and made of misinterpretations, for each age struggles against the others as against aliens by imposing its concerns and perspectives upon them. This history is forgetfulness rather than
memory; it is dismemberment, ignorance, externality. But the other history, without which the first would be impossible, is constituted and reconstituted step by step by the interest which bears us toward that
which is not us and by that life which the past, in a continuous exchange, brings to us and finds in us, and which it continues to lead in each painter who revives, recaptures, and renews the entire undertak-
ing of painting in each new work.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“If expression recreates and transforms, the same was already true of times preceding ours and even of our perception of the world before painting, since that perception already marked things with the trace of human elaboration. The productions of the past, which are the data of our time, themselves once went beyond anterior productions towards a future which we are, and in this sense called for (among others) the metamorphosis which we impose upon
them. One can no more inventory a painting (say what is there and what is not) than, according to the linguists, one can inventory a vocabulary—and for the same reason. In both cases it is not a question
of a finite sum of signs, but of an open field or of a new organ of human culture.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“The painter himself is a man at work who each morning finds in the shape of things the same questioning and the same call he never stops responding to. In his eyes, his work is never completed; it is always in progress, so that no one can prevail against the world...His labor, which is obscure for him, is nevertheless guided and oriented. It is always only a question of advancing the line of the already opened furrow and of recapturing and generalizing an accent which has already appeared in the corner of a previous painting or in some instant of his experience, without the painter himself ever being able to say (since the distinction has no meaning) what comes from him and what comes from things, what the new work adds to the old ones, or what it has taken from the others and what is its own...It is thus that the world as soon as he has seen it, his first attempts at painting, and the whole past of painting all deliver up a tradition to the painter—that is, Husserl remarks, the power to forget origins and to give to the past not a survival, which is the hypocritical form of forgetfulness, but a new life, which is the noble form of memory.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“When we make the writer's acquaintance, we feel foolishly disappointed at not finding, in each moment of his presence, that essence and impeccable speech that we have become accustomed to designating by his name. So that's what he does with his time? So that's the ugly house he lives in? And these are his friends, the woman with whom he shares his life? These, his mediocre concerns? But all this is only reverie—or even envy and secret hate. One admires as one should only after having understood that there are not any supermen, that there is no man who does not have a man's life to live, and that the secret of the woman loved, of the writer, or of the
painter, does not lie in some realm beyond his empirical life, but is so mixed in with his mediocre experiences, so modestly confused with his perception of the world, that there can be no question of meeting it face to face apart from his life.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“Each fragment of the world—and in particular the sea, sometimes riddled with eddies and ripples and plumed with spray, sometimes massive and immobile in itself—contains all sorts of shapes of being and, by the way it has of joining the encounter with one's glance, evokes a series of possible variants and teaches, over and beyond itself, a general way of expressing being. Renoir can paint women bathing and a fresh water brook while he is by the sea at Cassis because he only asks the sea—which alone can teach what he asks—for its way of interpreting the liquid substance, of exhibiting it, and of arranging it. In short, because he only asks for a typical form of
manifestations of water.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs

“Perception already stylizes, A woman passing by is not first and foremost a corporeal contour for mе, a colored mannequin, or a spectacle...She is a certain manner of being flesh which is given entirely in her walk or even in the simple shock of her heel on the
ground—as the tension of the bow is present in each fiber of wood--a very noticeable variation of the norm of walking, looking, touching, and speaking that I possess in my self-awareness because I am incarnate. If I am also a painter, what will be transmitted to the canvas will no longer be only a vital or sensual value. There will be in the painting
not just "a woman" or "an unhappy woman" or "a hatmaker." There will also be the emblem of a way of inhabiting the world, of handling it, and of interpreting it by a face as by clothing, by agility of gesture as by inertia of body—in short, the emblem of a certain relationship to being.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs