Gilles Deleuze 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

“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”

— Gilles Deleuze

“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

“It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.”

— Gilles Deleuze

“The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities”

— Gilles Deleuze

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

“You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.”

— Gilles Deleuze

“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

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

— Gilles Deleuze

“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

“It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id.”

— Gilles Deleuze

“Belief is necessarily something false that diverts and suffocates effective production”

— Gilles Deleuze

“A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.”

— Gilles Deleuze

“The historical fact is that cinema was constituted as such by becoming narrative, by presenting a story, and by rejecting its other possible directions. The approximation which follows is that, from that point, the sequences of images and even each image, a single shot, are assimilated to propositions or rather oral utterances [ ... ].”

— Gilles Deleuze

Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand. Desiring-machines or the nonhuman sex: not one or even two sexes, but n sexes.

— Gilles Deleuze

“Philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts .”

— Gilles Deleuze

“Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.”

— Gilles Deleuze

“In the literary machine that Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" constitutes, we are struck by the fact that all the parts are produced as asymmetrical sections, paths that suddenly come to an end, hermetically sealed boxes, noncommunicating vessels, watertight compartments, in which there are gaps even between things that are contiguous, gaps that are affirmations, pieces of a puzzle belonging not to any one puzzle but to many, pieces assembled by forcing them into a certain place where they may or may not belong, their unmatched edges violently forced out of shape, forcibly made to fit together, to interlock, with a number of pieces always left over.”

— Gilles Deleuze

The administration of a great organized molar security has as its correlate a whole micro-management of petty fears, a permanent molecular insecurity, to the point that the motto of domestic policymakers might be: a macropolitics of society by and for the micropolitics of insecurity

— Gilles Deleuze

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

Before being a mental state of the schizophrenic who has made himself into an artificial person through autism, schizophrenia is the process of the production of desire and desiring-machines.

— Gilles Deleuze

“How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? This is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one's own language? Kafka answers: steal the baby from its crib, walk the tight rope.”

— Gilles Deleuze

It is no longer an organism that functions but a BwO that is constructed. No longer are there acts to explain, dreams or phantasies to interpret, childhood memories to recall, words to make signify; instead there are colors and sounds, becomings and intensities (and when you become-dog, don't ask if the dog you are playing with is a dream or a reality, if it is 'your goddam mother' or something else entirely).

— Gilles Deleuze

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

The theory of thought is like painting: it needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction. This is the aim of a theory of thought without image.

— Gilles Deleuze

“The schizophrenic delirium lays bare the material processes of the unconscious”

— Gilles Deleuze

“The city seems to be a labyrinth that can be ordered. The world is an infinite series of curvatures or inflections, and the entire world is enclosed in the soul from one point of view.”

— Gilles Deleuze

“Morality consists in this for each individual: to attempt each time to extend its region of clear expression, to try to augment its amplitude, so as to produce a free act that expresses the most possible in one given condition or another.
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 73”

— Gilles Deleuze

“Creation takes place in bottlenecks ... A creator who isn't grabbed around the throat by a set of impossibilities is no creator. A creator's someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities ... it's by banging your head on the wall that you find a way through. You have to work on the wall, because without a set of impossibilities, you won't have the line of flight, the exit that is creation, the power of falsity that is truth. Your writing has to be liquid or gaseous simply because normal perception and opinion are solid, geometric ... You have to open up words, break things open, to free earth's vectors.”

— Gilles Deleuze

“Of course, Kafka doesn't see himself as a sort of party. He doesn't even pretend to be revolutionary, whatever his socialist sympathies may be. He knows that all the lines link him to a literary machine of expression for which he is simultaneously the gears, the mechanic, the operator, and the victim. So how will he proceed in this bachelor machine that doesn't make use of, and can't make use of, social critique? How will he make a revolution?
He will act on the German language such as it is in Czechoslovakia. Since it is a deterritorialized language in many ways, he will push the deterritorialization farther, not through intensities, reversals and thickenings of the language but through a sobriety that makes language take flight on a straight line, anticipates or produces its segmentations. Expression must sweep up content; the same process must happen to form ... It is not a politics of pessimism, nor a literary caricature or a form of science fiction.”

— Gilles Deleuze

“I haven't got the normal protective whorls, so that touching anything, especially fabric, causes such irritation that I need long nails to protect them.”

— Gilles Deleuze

It is a serious mistake to think that irrationalism opposes anything but thought to reason - whether it be the rights of the given, of the heart, of feeling, caprice or passion. In irrationalism we are concerned only
with thought, only with thinking. What is opposed to reason is thought itself; what is opposed to the reasonable being is the thinker
himself.

— Gilles Deleuze

“The gray butterfly understands so well the event "to be hidden" that, by remaining in the same place, plastered to the trunk of a tree, it covers the whole distance separating it from the "to invigorate" of the black butterfly; it also causes the other event to resonate as individual, within its own individuality as an event, and as a fortuitous case.”

— Gilles Deleuze

“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

“A creator is someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities.”

— Gilles Deleuze

“Intuition is neither a feeling, an inspiration nor a disorderly sympathy but a fully developed method.”

— Gilles Deleuze

“Images exist; things themselves are images ... Images constantly act on and react to one another, produce and consume. There is no difference between images, things and movement ...”

— Gilles Deleuze

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

— Gilles Deleuze

Reading something from beginning to end. That is reading with love.

— Gilles Deleuze

“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

“External images act on me, transmit movement to me, and I return movement: how could images be in my consciousness since I am myself image, that is, movement?”

— Gilles Deleuze

“Evaluations, in essence, are ... ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate.”

— Gilles Deleuze

Things never pass where you think, nor along the paths you think

— Gilles Deleuze

“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

“Photography, if there is photography, is already snapped, already shot, in the very interior of things and for all points of space.”

— Gilles Deleuze

The instinct of revenge is the force which constitutes the essence of what we call psychology, history, metaphysics and morality. The spirit of revenge is the genealogical element of our thought, the transcendental principle of our way of thinking.

— Gilles Deleuze

“Can you harness the power of drugs without them taking over, without turning into a dazed zombie?”

— Gilles Deleuze

“The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor; all that consists is Real.”

— Gilles Deleuze

“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

The philosopher creates, he doesn't reflect.

— Gilles Deleuze