Jacques Lacan Quotes

But what Freud showed us ... was that nothing can be grasped, destroyed, or burnt, except in a symbolic way, as one says, in effigie, in absentia.

When one loves, it has nothing to do with sex.

Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.

The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom

All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.

The I is always in the field of the Other.

Reading in no way obliges us to understand.

Love makes the Real of desire accessible without its tragic dimension

For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.

My thesis is that the moral law is articulated with relation to the real as such, to the real insofar as it can be the guarantee of the Thing.

I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you - the object petit a - I mutilate you.

The narration, in fact, doubles the drama with a commentary without which no mise en scene would be possible.

I am there where it is spoken that the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being.

The unconscious is structured like a language.

The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.

What could be more convincing, moreover, than the gesture of laying one's cards face up on the table?

If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at them in their own reality, not in biological experience.

Since Freud, the center of man is not where we thought it was; one has to go on from there.

In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.

Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge. And were they not such flying leaves, there would be no purloined letters.

by Baudelaire! things are pretty hot!

What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?

The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning.

The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.

From an analytic point of view, the only thing one can be guilty of is having given ground relative to one's desire (Seminar 7, 319)

The knowledge that there is a part of the psychic functions that are out of conscious reach, we did not need to wait for Freud to know this!

The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.

A secret to which truth has always initiated her lovers, and through which they have learned that it is in hiding that she offers to them most truly.

The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire.

It is only true inasmuch as it is truly followed.

There is something in you I like more than yourself. Therefore I must destroy you

The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.