Michel De Certeau Quotes

Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.

To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.

A memory is only a Prince Charming who stays just long enough to awaken the Sleeping Beauties of our wordless stories.

The only freedom supposed to be left to the masses is that of grazing on the ration of simulacra the system distributes to each individual.

An absence of meaning opens a gap in time.

The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly. News reports, information, statistics, and surveys are everywhere.

More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.

It seems possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation.

To walk is to lack a place.

The panorama-city is a 'theoretical' (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices.

The created order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order.

One is a socialist because one used to be one, no longer going to demonstrations, attending meetings, sending in one's dues, in short, without paying.

As a first approximation, I define belief not as the object of believing (a dogma, a program, etc.) but as the subject's investment in a proposition, the act of saying it and considering it as true.

Along with the lazy man... the dying man is the immoral man: the former, a subject that does not work; the latter, an object that no longer even makes itself available to be worked on by others.

Reading thus introduces an "art" which is anything but passive.