Top 40 Jacques Lacan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.”

— Jacques Lacan

2. “What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?”

— Jacques Lacan

3. “Love means giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.”

— Jacques Lacan

4. “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

5. “The unconscious is structured like a language.”

— Jacques Lacan

6. “All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.”

— Jacques Lacan

7. “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

8. “Love makes the Real of desire accessible without its tragic dimension.”

— Jacques Lacan

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

— Jacques Lacan

10. “The I is always in the field of the Other.”

— Jacques Lacan

11. “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

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

— Jacques Lacan

13. “The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire.”

— Jacques Lacan

14. “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.”

— Jacques Lacan

15. “The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning.”

— Jacques Lacan

16. “Obsessional does not necessarily mean sexual obsession, not even obsession for this, or for that in particular; to be an obsessional means to find oneself caught in a mechanism, in a trap increasingly demanding and endless.”

— Jacques Lacan

17. “Symptoms, those you believe you recognize, seem to you irrational because you take them in an isolated manner, and you want to interpret them directly.”

— Jacques Lacan

18. “For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.”

— Jacques Lacan

19. “What could be more convincing, moreover, than the gesture of laying one’s cards face up on the table?”

— Jacques Lacan

20. “I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you – the object petit a – I mutilate you.”

— Jacques Lacan

21. “There is something in you I like more than yourself. Therefore I must destroy you.”

— Jacques Lacan

22. “I am where I think not.”

— Jacques Lacan

23. “The narration, in fact, doubles the drama with a commentary without which no mise en scene would be possible.”

— Jacques Lacan

24. “Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge. And were they not such flying leaves, there would be no purloined letters.”

— Jacques Lacan

25. “Reading in no way obliges us to understand.”

— Jacques Lacan

26. “Many people talk about messages everywhere, inside the organism a hormone is a message, a beam of light to obtain teleguidance to a plane or from a satellite is a message, and so on; but the message in language is absolutely different. The message. Our message, in all cases comes from the Other by which I understand “from the place of the Other.”

— Jacques Lacan

27. “If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.”

— Jacques Lacan

28. “The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.”

— Jacques Lacan

29. “The knowledge that there is a part of the psychic functions that are out of conscious reach, we did not need to wait for Freud to know this!”

— Jacques Lacan

30. “The time for comprehending can be reduced to the instant of the glance, but this glance can include in its instant all the time needed for comprehending.”

— Jacques Lacan

31. “The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul, just as the beam of the psychoanalytic scales, when we calculate the tilt of its threat to entire communities, provides us with an indication of the deadening of the passions in society.”

— Jacques Lacan

32. “Psychoanalysis is a terribly efficient instrument, and because it is more and more a prestigious instrument, we run the risk of using it with a purpose for which it was not made for, and in this way we may degrade it.”

— Jacques Lacan

33. “Yet, analytical truth is not as mysterious, or as secret, so as to not allow us to see that people with a talent for directing consciences see truth rise spontaneously.”

— Jacques Lacan

34. “Man goes round in circles because the structure, the structure of man, is toric.”

— Jacques Lacan

35. “Since Freud, the center of man is not where we thought it was; one has to go on from there.”

— Jacques Lacan

36. “The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.”

— Jacques Lacan

37. “If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at them in their own reality, not in biological experience.”

— Jacques Lacan

38. “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

39. “What is realised in my history is not the past definitive of what it 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

40. “It is only true inasmuch as it is truly followed.”

— Jacques Lacan

41. “My thesis is that the moral law is articulated with relation to the real as such, to the real insofar as it can be the guarantee of the Thing.”

— Jacques Lacan

42. “The madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a king.”

— Jacques Lacan

43. “As is known, it is in the realm of experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we may grasp along what imaginary lines the human organism, in the most intimate recesses of its being, manifests its capture in a symbolic dimension.”

— Jacques Lacan

44. “S’il n y a pas de rapport sexuel c’est que l’Autre est d’une autre race.”

— Jacques Lacan

45. “Aside from that reservation, a fictive tale even has the advantage of manifesting symbolic necessity more purely to the extent that we may believe its conception arbitrary.”

— Jacques Lacan

46. “We emphasize that such a form of communication is not absent in man, however evanescent a naturally given object may be for him, split as it is in its submission to symbols.”

— Jacques Lacan

47. “Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel.”

— Jacques Lacan

48. “A certificate tells me that I was born. I repudiate this certificate: I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject.”

— Jacques Lacan

49. “I have long stressed the Hegelian procedure at work in this reversal of positions of the beautiful soul in relation to the reality he accuses. The point is not to adapt him to it, but to show him that he is only too well adapted to it, since he assists in its very fabrication.”

— Jacques Lacan