“The number and richness of man’s signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary.”

To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.

The world is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.

We know not through our intellect but through our experience.

Montaigne puts not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.

The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.

I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.

The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.

Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.

I am not in front of my body, I am in it or rather I am it… If we can still speak of interpretation in relation to the perception of one’s own body, we shall have to say that it interprets itself.

We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence.

The sensate body possesses an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis.

The world is nothing but ‘world-as-meaning.

It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.

Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument. And when we wish to move about, we do not move the body as we move an object.

Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful but also when it comes to happiness.

Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.