People will be surprised at the eagerness with which we went aboutpretending to rouse from its slumber a sexuality which every­thing-our discourses, our customs, our institutions, our regulations, our knowledges-was busy producing in the light of day and broadcasting to noisy accompaniment.

A way of life can be shared among individuals of different ages, status, and social activity. It can yield intense relations not resembling those that are institutionalized. It seems to me that a way of life can yield a culture and an ethics. To be "gay," I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual but to try and define and develop a way of life.

Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.

As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.

Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.

If those arrangements [the fundamental arrangements of knowledge] were to disappear as they appeared... then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.