Jacques Lacan > Quotes

“What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?

”
― Jacques Lacan

“Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.”
― Jacques Lacan

“The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 1, Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-1954

“I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.”
― Jacques Lacan

“The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom”
― Jacques Lacan

“I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.”
― Jacques Lacan

“There is something in you I like more than yourself. Therefore I must destroy you”
― Jacques Lacan

“I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you - the object petit a - I mutilate you.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

“But what Freud showed us… was that nothing can be grasped, destroyed, or burnt, except in a symbolic way, as one says, in effigie, in absentia.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

“I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

“When one loves, it has nothing to do with sex.”
― Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore

“I am there where it is spoken that the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being.”
― Jacques Lacan

“...Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack.”
― Jacques Lacan

“Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.”
― Jacques Lacan

“All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955

“Reading in no way obliges us to understand.”
― Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore

“Even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological.”
― Jacques Lacan

“The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.”
― Jacques Lacan

“Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel.”
― Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis

“Anxiety, as we know, is always connected with a loss…with a two-sided relation on the point of fading away to be superseded by something else, something which the patient cannot face without vertigo”
― Jacques Lacan

“The madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a king.”
― Jacques Lacan

“From an analytic point of view, the only thing one can be guilty of is having given ground relative to one’s desire (Seminar 7, 319)”
― Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960

“Amar es dar lo que no se tiene”
― J. Lacan

“A secret to which truth has always initiated her lovers, and through which they have learned that it is in hiding that she offers herself to them most truly.”
― Jacques Lacan, Écrits

“Cuz words”
― Jacques Lacan

“The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul, just as the beam of the psychoanalytic scales, when we calculate the tilt of its threat to entire communities, provides us with an indication of the deadening of the passions in society.”
― Jacques Lacan

“What is realised in my history is not the past definitive of what it was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.”
― Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection

“It is only true inasmuch as it is truly followed.”
― Jacques Lacan

“I am where I think not.”
― Jacques Lacan

“If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.”
― Jacques Lacan, Écrits