French Philosopher Quotes

The image can only be studied through the image, by dreaming images as they gather in reverie. It is a non-sense to claim to study imagination objectively since one really receives the image only if he admires it. Already in comparing one image to another, one runs the risk of losing participation in its individuality.

Gaston Bachelard

There is no culture without a tomb and no tomb without a culture; in the end the tomb is the first and only cultural symbol. The above-ground tomb does not have to be invented. It is the pile of stones in which the victim of the unanimous stoning is buried. It is the first pyramid.

I feel really assured by the fact that the women I have loved I have loved for always.

The sciences we are familiar with have been installed in a number of great 'continents'. Before Marx, two such continents had been opened up to scientific knowledge: the continent of Mathematics and the continent of Physics. The first by the Greeks (Thales), the second by Galileo. Marx opened up a third continent to scientific knowledge: the continent of History.

Louis Althusser

Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.

Waiting is directed at nothing: any object that could gratify it would only efface it. Still, it is not confined to one place, it is not a resigned immobility; it has the endurance of a movement that will never end and would never promise itself the reward of rest; it does not wrap itself in interiority; all of it falls irremediably outside.

Michel Foucault

It is human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress it, it is the agitation of all menthat alone determines revolutionary mental forms, in opposition to bourgeois mental forms.

Georges Bataille

Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Education-whether its object be children or adults, individuals or an entire people-consists in creating motives.

Nothing is sudden in nature: whereas the slightest storms are forecasted several days in advance, the destruction of the world must have been announced several years beforehand by heat waves, by winds, by meteorites, in short, by an infinity of phenomena.

Nicolas Antoine Boulanger

It is the liberty that is the mother, not the daughter, of order.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

The end of the world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its complexity and its centrality... the overthrow of equilibrium, detaching the mind, furfilled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega... critical point simultaneously of emergence and emersion, of maturation and evasion.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Science has equipped man in less than fifty years with more tools than he had made during the thousands of years he had lived on earth. Each new machine being for man a new organ — an artificial organ — his body became suddenly and prodigiously increased in size, without his soul being at the same time able to dilate to the dimensions of his body.

We are advised and led along by second-rate moralists who only know how to work themselves into a delirium and pass their illness onto others.

Émile Chartier

To live is often to struggle toward goals one has no desire to reach.

Foresight is indispensable for action. Now action for any organism of the animal kingdom is an absolute necessity. Surrounded by hostile nature it must act, it must foresee, if it wishes to live. "All life, all action," says Fouillée, "is a conscious or an unconscious divining. Divine or you will be devoured."

Émile Meyerson

The only successful revolution of this century is totalitarianism.

Bernard-Henri Lévy

Hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories and all calculations, a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me

Express only that which cannot be expressed. Leave it unexpressed)

Maurice Blanchot

Happiness lies only in that which excites, and the only thing that excites is crime.

Marquis de Sade

To discover the true principles of morality, men have no need of theology, of revelation, or of gods. They need but common sense. They have only to look within themselves, to reflect upon their own nature, to consult their obvious interests, to consider the object of society and of each of the members who compose it, and they will easily understand that virtue is an advantage, and that vice is an injury to beings of the species.

Every time that a man who is not an absolute fool presents you with a
question he considers very problematic after giving it careful thought,
distrust those quick answers that come to the mind of someone who has
considered it only briefly or not at all. These answers are usually
simplistic views lacking in consistency, which explain nothing, or which do
not bear examination.

Joseph de Maistre

The domain of physics is no proper field for mathematical pastimes. The best security would be in giving a geometrical training to physicists, who need not then have recourse to mathematicians, whose tendency is to despise experimental science.

My life will have been a succession of lives, as if I have had several lives, a multiplicity of stories and roles. I have not ceased to have changes of life.

Bernard Stiegler

Indeed, theological discourse offers its strange jubilation only to the strict extent that it permits and, dangerously, demands of it wokman that he speak beyond his means, precisely because he does not speak of himself. Hence the danger of a speech that, in a sense, speaks against the one who lends himself to it. One must obtain forgiveness for every essay in theology. In all senses.

Jean-Luc Marion