Michel Foucault Quotes: 8

• What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.

• Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.

• People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.

  Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

• The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.

• Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.

  Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

• Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present.

• Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.

• […] marginile unei cărţi nu sunt niciodată clar şi riguros trasate: dincolo de titlu, de primele rânduri şi de punctul final, mai presus de configuraţia sa internă şi de forma care îi conferă autonomie, ea se află prinsă într-un sistem de trimiteri la alte cărţi, la alte texte, la alte fraze: este un nod într-o reţea.

  The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language