Jacques Lacan

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

- Jacques Lacan

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

- Jacques Lacan

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

- Jacques Lacan

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

- Jacques Lacan

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

- Jacques Lacan

"I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming."

- Jacques Lacan

"I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think."

- Jacques Lacan

"I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real."

- Jacques Lacan

"The real is what resists symbolization absolutely"

- Jacques Lacan

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

- Jacques Lacan

"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."

- Jacques Lacan

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

- Jacques Lacan

"...Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack."

- Jacques Lacan

"Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers."

- Jacques Lacan