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

About the author

Popular quotes

“Artist colonies are notorious for breaking up marriages and housing affairs.”
― Kerry Cohen, quote from Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity

“When men see an attractive woman, they fantasize about sex. When women see an attractive man they fantasize about a relationship.”
― Alexandra Potter, quote from Do You Come Here Often?

“Reacher’s personal rule of thumb was never to revive a guy who had just pulled a gun on him. He was fairly inflexible on the matter.”
― Lee Child, quote from Worth Dying For

“13  The fear of the LORD is to hate evil: pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, and the froward mouth, do I hate.”
― Matthew Henry, quote from A Church in the House: Restoring Daily Worship to the Christian Household

“A ese tiempo infame lo llaman siglo de Oro. Mas lo cierto es que, quienes lo vivimos y sufrimos, de oro vimos poco; y de plata, la justa. Sacrificio estéril, gloriosas derrotas, corrupción, picaresca, miseria y poca vergüenza, de eso sí que tuvimos a espuertas. Lo que pasa es que luego uno va y mira un cuadro de Diego Velázquez, oye unos versos de Lope o de Calderón, lee un soneto de don Francisco de Quevedo, y se dice que bueno, que tal vez mereció la pena.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, quote from Captain Alatriste

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.