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Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Michel Foucault Quotes

“To seek in the great accumulation of the already-said the text that resembles "in advance" a later text, to ransack history in order to rediscover the play of anticipations or echoes, to go right back to the first seeds or to go forward to the last traces, to reveal in a work its fidelity to tradition or its irreducible uniqueness, to raise or lower its stock of originality, to say that the Port -Royal grammarians invented nothing, or to discover that Cuvier had more predecessors than one thought, these are harmless enough amusements for historians who refuse to grow up.”

KnowsFirstsSaidEnoughPlayLastsScienceOrderGrowsKnowledgeGrowing UpTraditionRaisesRefuseSeedsHistorianOriginalityAnticipationUniquenessEchoesRoyalAmusementAccumulationFidelityPortPredecessors
Author:Michel Foucault
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“I wasn't always smart, I was actually very stupid in school [T]here was a boy who was very attractive who was even stupider than I was. And in order to ingratiate myself with this boy who was very beautiful, I began to do his homework for him – and that's how I became smart, I had to do all this work to just keep ahead of him a little bit, in order to help him. In a sense, all the rest of my life I've been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys.”

TryingLittlesHelpingSchoolBeautifulOrderBitsBoysStupidLittle BitIntellectualSmartAttractiveHomeworkVery BeautifulVery Stupid
Author:Michel Foucault
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“I belong to that generation who, as students, had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism. For me the break was first Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a breathtaking performance.”

FirstsEyeWaitingBreakGenerationsStudentsPerformancesExistentialismHorizonMarxismBreathtakingBeckettPhenomenologyGodotWaiting For Godot
Book:Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel
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“What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression”

NeedsWholeFactsBodyRunningFormForceSocialPleasureProduceNegativeFunctionAcceptedInstanceProductiveDiscourseRepressionTraverse
Book:The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature
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“Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which the Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.”

BelieveLongRealityFormLawDifferencesLimitsNegativeFlowSacredUnityWesternAccessProductiveCategoriesMultipleArrangementsMobileAllegianceUniformityNomadicSedentaryCastration
Author:Michel Foucault
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“And more than once in the course of time, the same theme reappears: among the mystics of the fifteenth century, it has become the motif of the soul as a skiff, abandoned on the infinite sea of desires, in the sterile field of cares and ignorance, among the mirages of knowledge, amid the unreason of the world - a craft at the mercy of the sea's great madness, unless it throws out a solid anchor, faith, or raises its spiritual sails so that the breath of God may bring it to port.”

WorldMaySoulCareSpiritualDesireCoursesSeaCenturyFieldsIgnoranceMercyMadnessInfiniteBreathsRaisesCraftsThemeAbandonedSailAnchorsPortMiragesMotifs
Book:Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
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“There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.”

ThinkingWorldBookIdeasEarthForceLeaderTeachStruggleImagineEventsBirthPoliticianStrongerPassionateActiveManifestBursting
Author:Michel Foucault
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