Michel Foucault Quotes

I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.

In fact, philosophy is universal in scope. No man can live without a world view; therefore, there is no man who is not a philosopher.

Nature is earlier than man, but man is earlier than natural science.

Philosophy is the thoughts of men about human thinking, reasoning and imagining, and the real values in human existence.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

Do not imagine that what we have said of the insufficiency of our understanding and of its limited extent is an assertion founded only on the Bible: for philosophers likewise assert the same, and perfectly understand it,- without having regard to any religion or opinion.

Philosophy, most broadly viewed, is the critical survey of existence from the standpoint of value.

This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.

Whenever you're talking about meaning, basically... I think a lot of the human experience has to do with trying to understand what things mean, and there's not really any tools to do that unless you're thinking about it in a more spiritual or philosophical realm.

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

I also like to look at the dynamic that takes place between religion and science because, in a way, both are asking the same questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? The methodologies are diametrically opposed, but their motivation is the same; the wellspring is the same in both cases.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

If you cannot render me a reason how I came hither, and what I am, I must go to those who will render me one. And if that craving be not satisfied by a rational theory of life, it will demand satisfaction from some magical theory;

All human knowledge thus begins with intuitions, proceeds thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.

Science and literature are both ways to ask questions about why we're here.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

Man's quest for knowledge is an expanding series whose limit is infinity, but philosophy seeks to attain that limit at one blow, by a short circuit providing the certainty of complete and inalterable truth. Science meanwhile advances at its gradual pace, often slowing to a crawl, and for periods it even walks in place, but eventually it reaches the various ultimate trenches dug by philosophical thought, and, quite heedless of the fact that it is not supposed to be able to cross those final barriers to the intellect, goes right on.

Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.

No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society.

Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction!

The problems of philosophy and the systems designed to solve them are formulated in terms which tend to refer, not to the realm of actuality, but to the realms of possibility and necessity: to what might be and what must be, rather than to what is.

And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life.