In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.

But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.

Sadder than destitution, sadder than a beggar is the man who eats alone in public. Nothing more contradicts the laws of man or beast, for animals always do each other the honor of sharing or disputing each other's food.

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.

Genius is childhood recaptured.

Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.