Gilles Deleuze famous quotes

A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Inspirational #Freedom #Philosophy

The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Writing #Men #Shame

The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#People #Silence #Solitude

Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Art #Philosophy #Brain

Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Law #Political #Unity

The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Philosophy #Fighting #Men

I have no admiration for culture. I have no reserve knowledge, no provisional knowledge. And everything that I learn, I learn for a particular task, and once it's done, I immediately forget it, so that if ten years later, I have to get involved with something close to or directly within the same subject, I would have to start again from zero, with some few exceptions.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Zero #Years #Done

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Country #Writing #Cartography

Things never pass where you think, nor along the paths you think
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Thinking #Path

A creator is someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Possibility #Creator #Impossibility

It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Monsters #Slumber #Reason

Intuition is neither a feeling, an inspiration nor a disorderly sympathy but a fully developed method.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Inspiration #Feelings #Intuition

According to Beckett's or Kafka's law, there is immobility beyond movement: beyond standing up, there is sitting down, and beyond sitting down, lying down, beyond which one finally dissipates.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Lying #Law #Sitting Down

A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Government #Leftists

There's no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Needs #Looks #Weapons

The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator—computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribed there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Dream #Reality #Order

Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Writing #Poetry #Consistency

It's not easy to see things from the middle, rather than looking down on them from above or up at them from below, or from left to right or right to left: try it, you'll see that everything changes.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Trying #Things Change #Easy

Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Thinking #Vanity #Ease

Bring something incomprehensible into the world!
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Individuality #World

It is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center draws its power, hence their extreme maliciousness, and vanity
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Vanity #Depth #Draws

Language is not made to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience newspapers, news, proceed by redundancy, in that they tell us what we ‘must’ think, retain, expect, etc. language is neither informational nor communicational. It is not the communication of information but something quite different: the transmission of order-words, either from one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the statement
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Communication #Thinking #Order

The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Animal #Shadow #Body

Psychoanalysts are bent on producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture. It is Oedipus who produces man in this fashion and who gives a structure to the false movement of infinite progression and regression
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Fashion #Men #Oedipus

D.H. Lawrence had the impression – that psychoanalysis was shutting sexuality up in a bizarre sort of box painted with bourgeois motifs, in a kind of rather repugnant artificial triangle, thereby stifling the whole of sexuality as a production of desire so as to recast it along entirely different lines, making of it a ‘dirty little secret’, a dirty little family secret, a private theater rather than the fantastic factory of nature and production
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Dirty #Secret #Desire

The various forms of education or ‘normalization’ imposed upon an individual consist in making him or her change points of subjectification, always moving towards a higher, nobler one in closer conformity with the supposed ideal. Then from the point of subjectification issues a subject of enunciation, as a function of a mental reality determined by that point. Then from the subject of enunciation issues a subject of the statement, in other words, a subject bound to statements in conformity with a dominant reality
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Moving #Reality #Issues

One of the principal motifs of Nietzsche's work is that Kant had not carried out a true critique because he was not able to pose the problem of critique in terms of values.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Able #Problem #Motifs

Nietzsche's break with Schopenhauer rests on precisely this point; it is a matter of knowing whether the will is unitary or multiple.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Knowing #Matter #Break

The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor; all that consists is Real.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Real #Consistency #Metaphor

Underneath all reason lies delirium and drift.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Lying #Delirium #Reason

What do you know about me, given that I believe in secrecy? ... If I stick where I am, if I don't travel around, like anyone else I make my inner journeys that I can only measure by my emotions, and express very obliquely and circuitously in what I write. ... Arguments from one's own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Believe #Writing #Journey

The aim of critique is not the ends of man or of reason but in the end the Overman, the overcome, overtaken man. The point of critique is not justification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Men #Feelings #Overcoming

When Nietzsche praises egoism it is always in an aggressive or polemical way, against the virtues, against the virtue of disinterestedness (Z III "Of the three evil things"). But in fact egoism is a bad interpretation of the will, just as atomism is a bad interpretation of force. In order for there to be egoism it is necessary for there to be an ego.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Order #Evil #Ego

The percept is the landscape before man, in the absence of man.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Men #Landscape #Absence

I believe strongly that philosophy has nothing to do with specialists.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Philosophy #Believe #I Believe

The philosopher creates, he doesn't reflect.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Philosopher

Only thought is capable of inventing the fiction of a State that is universal by right, of elevation the State to the level of de jure universality
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Fiction #Levels #States

To affirm is not to bear, carry, or harness oneself to that which exists, but on the contrary to unburden, unharness, and set free that which lives.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Bears #Harness #Oneself

A tyrant institutionalises stupidity, but he is the first servant of his own system and the first to be installed within it.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Tyrants #Stupidity #Firsts

Evaluations, in essence, are … ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Essence #Judging #Way

To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one's self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Self #Order #Lines

An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Philosophy #Thinking #People

In order for music to free itself, it will have to pass over to the other side - there where territories tremble, where the structures collapse, where the ethoses get mixed up, where a powerful song of the earth is unleashed, the great ritornelles that transmutes all the airs it carries away and makes return.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Music #Song #Powerful

Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Fighting #Men #Salvation

In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.
-- Gilles Deleuze

Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive, nor communicative. They are creative, that's all.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Art #Philosophy #Creative

Instead of gambling on the eternal impossibility of the revolution and on the fascist return of a war-machine in general, why not think that a new type of revolution is in the course of becoming possible, and that all kinds of mutating, living machines conduct wars, are combined and trace out a plane of consistance which undermines the plane of organization of the World and the States?
-- Gilles Deleuze

#War #Thinking #Gambling

Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Thinking #Encounters #Fundamentals

The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself. Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Thinking #Encounters #Fundamentals

The morality of customs,the spirit of the laws, produces the man emancipated from the law.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Men #Law #Spirit

belief is necessarily something false that diverts and suffocates effective production
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Belief

Is it not first through the voice that one becomes animal?
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Animal #Voice #Firsts

The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Doors #Self #Two

Christianity taught us to see the eye of the lord looking down upon us. Such forms of knowledge project an image of reality, at the expense of reality itself. They talk figures and icons and signs, but fail to perceive forces and flows. They bind us to other realities, and especially the reality of power as it subjugates us. Their function is to tame, and the result is the fabrication of docile and obedient subjects.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Eye #Reality #Icons

Philosophy is not in a state of external reflection on other domains, but in a state of active and internal alliance with them, and it is neither more abstract nor more difficult.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Philosophy #Reflection #Alliances

Every time someone puts an objection to me, I want to say: 'OK, OK, let's go on to something else.' Objections have never contributed anything.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Goes On #Want

What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages or combinations: how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Space #Smooth #Force

Either it is the fold of the infinite, or the constant folds [replis] of finitude which curve the outside and constitute the inside.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Curves #Infinite #Constant

The law is not known, since there is nothing in it to know. We come across it only through its action, and it acts only through its sentence and its execution. It is not distinguishable from the application. We know it only through its imprint on our heart and our flesh: we are guilty, necessarily guilty. Guilt is like the moral thread which duplicates the thread of time.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Heart #Law #Guilt

You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Devil #Lord #Walks

There’s no democratic state that’s not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Misery #States #Democratic

Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object.
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Ordinary #Use #Way

Psychoanalysis was from the start, still is, and perhaps always will be a well-constituted church and a form of treatment based on a set of beliefs that only the very faithful could adhere to, i.e., those who believe in a security that amounts to being lost in the herd and defined in terms of common and external goals
-- Gilles Deleuze

#Believe #Goal #Faithful