“To eat steak rare represents both a nature and a morality.”

Every photograph is a certificate of presence.

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.

Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.

The new is not a fashion, it is a value.

Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? -This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.

There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.

Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.

Where you are tender, you speak your plural.

Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?

Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.

In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The ‘anything whatever’ then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.

He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.

Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

How you dress on the outside, it represents your soul.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

We have to have a diversity of age represented in Congress, too.

One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.

Let it never surprise true Christians if they are slandered and misrepresented in this world. They must not expect to fare better than their Lord.

Money hasn’t any value of its own; it represents the stored up energy of men and women and is really just someone’s promise to pay a certain amount of that energy.

Those traits that pass into hybrid association entirely or almost entirely unchanged, thus themselves representing the traits of the hybrid, are termed dominating and those that become latent in the association, recessive.

The spectral density of black body radiation; represents something absolute, and since the search for the absolutes has always appeared to me to be the highest form of research, I applied myself vigorously to its solution.