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1 " 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
2 " ...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. "
3 " 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. "
4 " 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 , The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Seminar of Jacques Lacan)
5 " Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it. "
6 " 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. "
7 " A secret to which truth has always initiated her lovers, and through which they have learned that it is in hiding that she offers herself to them most truly. "
― Jacques Lacan , Écrits
8 " S'il n y a pas de rapport sexuel c'est que l'Autre est d'une autre race. "
9 " The madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a king. "
10 " Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel. "
― Jacques Lacan , The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis
11 " All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors. "
― Jacques Lacan , The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955
12 " 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. "
13 " 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) "
― Jacques Lacan , The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960 (Seminar of Jacques Lacan)
14 " L'unica cosa di cui si possa essere colpevoli è di aver ceduto sul proprio desiderio "
15 " What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe? "
16 " The real is what resists symbolization absolutely. "
― Jacques Lacan , The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Freud's Papers on Technique
17 " The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom "
18 " 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. "
19 " There is something in you I like more than yourself. Therefore I must destroy you "
20 " 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. "
