Ida Maria PAN > Ida Maria's Quotes

“A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“Fléctere si néqueo súperos Acheronta movebo - If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell.”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.”
― Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

“O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus, L’été

“Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.”
― Roland Barthes

“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.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“You may forget but
let me tell you
this: someone in
some future time
will think of us”
― Sappho, The Art of Loving Women

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“What cannot be said will be wept.”
― Sappho

“I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Where there is power, there is resistance.”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

“I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.”
― Michel Foucault

“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?”
― Michel Foucault

“Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.”
― Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader

“...if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing”
― Michel Foucault

“I don't write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.”
― Michel Foucault

“self-attachment is the first sign of madness, but it is because man is attached to himself that he accepts error as truth, lies as reality, violence and ugliness as beauty and justice.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“This knowledge, so inaccessible, so formidable, the Fool, in his innocent idiocy, already possesses.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“The marvellous logic of the mad which seems to mock that of the logicians because it resembles it so exactly, or rather because it is exactly the same, and because at the secret heart of madness, at the core of so many errors, so many absurdities, so many words and gestures without consequence, we discover, finally, the hidden perfection of a language.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“And if it is true that the image still has the function of speaking, of transmitting something consubstantial with language, we must recognize that it already no longer says the same thing; and that by its own plastic values painting engages in an experiment that will take it farther and farther from language, whatever the superficial identity of the theme. Figure and speech still illustrate the same fable of folly in the same moral world, but already they take two different directions, indicating, in a still barely perceptible scission, what will be the great line of cleavage in the Western experience of madness. The”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“At the opposite pole to this nature of shadows, madness fascinates because it is knowledge. It is knowledge, first, because all these absurd figures are in reality elements of a difficult, hermetic, esoteric learning. These strange forms are situated, from the first, in the space of the Great Secret, and the Saint Anthony who is tempted by them is not a victim of the violence of desire but of the much more insidious lure of curiosity; he is tempted by that distant and intimate knowledge which is offered, and at the same time evaded, by the smile of the gryllos; his backward movement is nothing but that step by which he keeps from crossing the forbidden limits of knowledge; he knows already—and”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“And now, if we try to assign a value, in and of itself, outside its relations to the dream and with error, to classical unreason, we must understand it not as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“madness is the false punishment of a false solution, but by its own virtue it brings to light the real problem, which can then be truly resolved.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“For the madness of men is a divine spectacle: “In fact, could one make observations from the Moon, as did Menippus, considering the numberless agitations of the Earth, one would think one saw a swarm of flies or gnats fighting among themselves, struggling and laying traps, stealing from one another, playing, gamboling, falling, and dying, and one would not believe the troubles, the tragedies that were produced by such a minute animalcule destined to perish so shortly.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. And the land he will come to is unknown—as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“Once leprosy had gone, and the figure of the leper was no more than a distant memory, these structures still remained. The game of exclusion would be played again, often in these same places, in an oddly similar fashion two or three centuries later. The role of the leper was to be played by the poor and by the vagrant, by prisoners and by the 'alienated', and the sort of salvation at stake for both parties in this game of exclusion is the matter of this study.”
― Michel Foucault, History of Madness

“There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction