304 Quotes by Michel Foucault

It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.

Take the notion of tradition: it is intended to give a special temporal status to a group of phenomena that are both successive and identical (or at least similar); it makes it possible to rethink the dispersion of history in the form of the same; it allows a reduction of the difference proper to every beginning, in order to pursue without discontinuity the endless search for origin.

Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy into a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.

We must escape and help others to escape the two readymade formulas of the pure sexual encounter and the lovers' fusion of identities.

The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is – to live it dangerously.

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.

Exercise is the technique by which one imposes on the body tasks that are both repetitive and different, but always graduated. By bending behavior towards a terminal state, exercise makes possible a perpetual characterization of the individual... It thus assures, in the form of continuity and constraint, a growth, an observation, a qualification.

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.

Writing unfolds like a game that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is rather a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.