The child who is to be born is already, from head to toe, caught in this language hammock that receives him and at the same time imprisons him.

Physical death is the object of the wish for a second death.

The lozenge ♢ is to be read as "desire for," being read right to left.

Signification no more emanates from life than phlogiston escapes from bodies in combustion.

If I seem to be advancing slowly, believe me: no stagnation is too much.

It is impossible to represent the signifier, the signified, and the subject on the same plane.

People imagine that a psychoanalyst should be a happy man. Indeed, is it not happiness that people ask him for, and how could he give it, commonsense asks, if he does not have a bit of it himself?

People have paid very little attention to what poetry does, and to whom.

What do you mean by the other? –– Your fellow man? Your neighbor? Your ideal I? A washbowl? These are all others.

In our time it is the character of the specialist who intimidates.

The analyst’s science is a reading—a reading of meaning. No doubt that is why, behind the doors of his office, he is taken for a witch.

The subject is no one. It is decomposed, in pieces. And it is jammed, sucked in, by the image of the other.

It is rare in our day and age for a man to be sufficiently wonderstruck by a clock.

Hegel is at the limit of anthropology. Freud got out of it. His discovery is that man isn't entirely in man.

I could also say something incompatible with what I have just said. That would also be the truth.

There isn't only showing and seeing, there is also letting something be seen.

The division between the viviparous and the oviparous is really a befuddling one.

To know what the partner is going to do is not a proof of love.

What is a Father?

Interpretation is not put to the test of a truth that can be settled by a yes or a no; it unleashes truth as such.