Quotes from Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“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, quote from Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?”
― Michel Foucault, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“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, quote from 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, quote from Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“Matthey, a Geneva physician very close to Rousseau's influence, formulates the prospect for all men of reason: 'Do not glory in your state, if you are wise and civilized men; an instant suffices to disturb and annihilate that supposed wisdom of which you are so proud; an unexpected event, a sharp and sudden emotion of the soul will abruptly change the most reasonable and intelligent man into a raving idiot.”
― Michel Foucault, quote from Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“A symbolic unity formed by the languor of the fluids, by the darkening of the animal spirits and the shadowy twi­light they spread over the images of things, by the viscosity of the blood that laboriously trickles through the vessels, by the thickening of vapors that have become blackish, deleterious, and acrid, by visceral functions that have be­come slow and somehow slimy-this unity, more a product of sensibility than of thought or theory, gives melancholia its characteristic stamp.”
― Michel Foucault, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“Sadism ... is a massive cultural fact that appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century and that constitutes one of the greatest conversions of the occidental imagination ... madness of desire, the insane delight of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite.”
― Michel Foucault, quote from 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, quote from Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“The head that will become a skull is already empty. Madness is the déjà-là of death.”
― Michel Foucault, quote from 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, quote from Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“Menuret repeats an observation of Forestier's that clearly shows how an excessive loss of a humor, by drying out the vessels and fibers, may provoke a state of mania; this was the case of a young man who 'having married his wife in the summertime, became maniacal as a result of the excessive intercourse he had with her.”
― Michel Foucault, quote from Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“All life was finally judged by this degree of irritation: abuse of things that were not natural, the sedentary life of cities, novel reading, theatergoing, immoderate thirst for knowledge,”
― Michel Foucault, quote from 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, quote from Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence....”
― Michel Foucault, quote from 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, quote from Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“it becomes probable that the so-called immaterial hysterical affection and hypochondriacal disease derive from the dispositions of the particular state of the fibers.” It is to this sensibility, this mobility, that we must attribute the sufferings, the spasms, the singular pains so readily suffered by “young girls of pale complexion, and individuals too much given to study and meditation.”
― Michel Foucault, quote from Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“From a Christian point of view, human reason is madness compared to the reason of God, but divine reason appears as madness to human reason.”
― Michel Foucault, quote from Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“nervous sufferers are the most irritable, that is, have the most sensibility: tenuousness of fiber, delicacy of organism; but they also have an easily impressionable soul, an unquiet heart, too strong a sympathy for what happens around them.”
― Michel Foucault, quote from Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“In the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: on on hand, the man of reason delegates the physician to madness, thereby authorizing a relation only through the abstract universality of disease; on the other, the man of madness communicates with society only by the intermediary of an equally abstract reason which is order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, the requirements of conformity.”
― Michel Foucault, quote from Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“In the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: on one hand, the man of reason delegates the physician to madness, thereby authorizing a relation only through the abstract universality of disease; on the other, the man of madness communicates with society only by the intermediary of an equally abstract reason which is order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, the requirements of conformity.”
― Michel Foucault, quote from Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“the intense Catholic renaissance during the Counter-Reformation produced in France a very particular character of simultaneous competition and complicity between the government and the Church.”
― Michel Foucault, quote from Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“The great hospitals, houses of confinement, establishments of religion and public order, of assistance and punishment, of governmental charity and welfare measures, are a phenomenon of the classical period:”
― Michel Foucault, quote from Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“From being the object of a religious experience and sanctified, poverty became the object of a moral conception that condemned”
― Michel Foucault, quote from Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

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“My father was taking me as seriously as the Ringolds were, but not with Ira’s political fearlessness, with Murray’s literary ingenuity, above all, with their seeming absence of concern for my decorum, for whether I would or would not be a good boy. The Ringolds were the one-two punch promising to initiate me into the big show, into my beginning to understand what it takes to be a man on the larger scale. The Ringolds compelled me to respond at a level of rigor that felt appropriate to who I now was. Be a good boy wasn’t the issue with them. The sole issue was my convictions. But then, their responsibility wasn’t a father’s, which is to steer his son away from the pitfalls. The father has to worry about the pitfalls in a way the teacher doesn’t. He has to worry about his son’s conduct, he has to worry about socializing his little Tom Paine. But once little Tom Paine has been let into the company of men and the father is still educating him as a boy, the father is finished. Sure, he’s worrying about the pitfalls—if he wasn’t, it would be wrong. But he’s finished anyway. Little Tom Paine has no choice but to write him off, to betray the father and go boldly forth to step straight into life’s very first pit. And then, all on his own—providing real unity to his existence—to step from pit to pit for the rest of his days, until the grave, which, if it has nothing else to recommend it, is at least the last pit into which one can fall.”
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“Conferences are assemblies of people who argue about how to conduct an argument and end by sending a telegram of congratulation to the minister.”
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“Methinks marriage has made my brother soft,” Alaric replied. “ ’Tis a shame when a puny lass has to save his arse.”
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“eventually we’ll be old and wrinkled. Like everybody. But we’ll look a lot better if we’re happy inside. If we used our brains and our talents instead of stressing over what someone else defines as ‘pretty.’ ”
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