Michel Foucault Quotes

The point is... to live one's life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstacy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world.

Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself.

What strange beings we are! That sitting in hell at the bottom of the dark, we're afraid of our own immortality.

And I would often wake up at night and stare widely into the room: Am I in Hell?

It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed.

The heart of man is the place the devil dwells in; I feel sometimes a hell within myself.

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

Monsters are the result of the sleep of reason.

Nights were the worst. I'd try to get some sleep, only to be thrown out of bed and dragged out into the compound for another game of "Let's whack Bobby in the dark!" - Bobby Pendragon, RoZ

Not everyone is capable of madness; and of those lucky enough to be capable, not many have the courage for it.

The dream of reason produces monsters

There is not one among us in whom a devil does not dwell; at some time, on some point, that devil masters each of us... It is not having been in the Dark House, but having left it, that counts.

There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were.

There's in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again

If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?

Weren't we all crazy in our sleep? What was sleep, after all, but the process by which we dumped our insanity into a dark subconscious pit and came out on the other side ready to eat cereal instead of our neighbor's children?

I cheat him, I deceive him, yet the world does not sink in sulphur-colored mists. Madness conquers. I can no longer put my mosaics together. I just cry and laugh.

Who but the mad would choose to keep on living? In the end, aren't we all just a little crazy?

You do come to a point where you can get your life in control a bit. But going through life, you discover these deep, dark things in yourself that you can’t run away from, so you have to learn to embrace them. I mean, the difference between a murderer and myself is only that I choose not to do it. But I’m capable.

So we reach into the raging chaos, and we cling to it, and we tell ourselves it has meaning, and that the world is good, and we are not evil, and we will all go home in the end.

There's a Mr. Hyde for every happy Jekyll face, a dark face on the other side of the mirror. The brain behind that face never heard of razors, prayers, or the logic of the universe. You turn the mirror sideways and see your face reflected with a sinister left-hand twist, half mad and half sane.

Ordinary men live in fear all the time. Didn't you know that? We're afraid of the weather, we're afraid of powerful men, we're afraid of the night and the monsters that lurk in the dark, we're afraid of growing old and of dying. Sometimes we're even afraid of living. Ordinary men are afraid almost every minute of their lives.

I know I have to write about the things that keep me awake at night.

Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.