Michel Foucault Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. Death as the destruction of all things no longer had meaning when life was revealed to be a fatuous sequence of empty words, the hollow jingle of a jester’s cap and bells. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

2. 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

3. 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

4. The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.

5. […] 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 and The Discourse on Language

6. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it. The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language

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

8. Le voyage rajeunit les choses, et il vieillit le rapport à soi.

9. 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

10. The necessity of reform mustn’t be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce, or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tell one: Don’t criticize, since you’re not capable of carrying out a reform. That’s ministerial cabinet talk. Critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction that concludes, this, then, is what needs to be done. It should be an instrument for those for who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn’t have to lay down the law for the law. It isn’t a stage in a programming. It is a challenge directed to what is. The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984

11. This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences