304 Quotes by Michel Foucault

Hermann Boerhaave still defined melancholia as merely “a long persistent delirium without fever, during which the sufferer is obsessed by only one thought.

Moreover, it is not entirely without significance that true love was, in Platonic philosophy – but also, as you know, in a whole sector, a whole domain of Christian spirituality and mysticism – the form par excellence of the true life. Since Platonism, true love and the true life have traditionally belonged together, and to a large extend Christian Platonism will take up this theme.

If there is, in classical madness, something which refers elsewhere, and to other things, it is no longer because the madman comes from the world of the irrational and bears its stigmata; rather, it is because he crosses the frontiers of bourgeois order of his own accord, and alienates himself outside the sacred limits of its ethic.

I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.

There can only be a true life as an other life, and it’s from the point of view of this other life that the ordinary life of ordinary people will be made to appear as precisely other than the true. I live in an other way, and through the very alterity of my life, I show you that what you are looking for is elsewhere than where you are looking, that the road you are taking is an other road than the one you should be taking.

There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.

Islam, in the year 1978, was not the opium of the people precisely because it was the spirit of a world without spirit.

Menuret repeats an observation of Forestier’s that clearly shows how an excessive loss of a humor, by drying out the vessels and fibers, may provoke a state of mania; this was the case of a young man who ’having married his wife in the summertime, became maniacal as a result of the excessive intercourse he had with her.

I’m no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.