Top 87 Quotes & Sayings by Gilles Deleuze

Intensities are implicated multiplicities, 'implexes,' made up of relations between asymmetrical elements.

Israel has never hidden its goal, creating a vacuum in the Palestinian territory.

The speculative object and the practical object of philosophy as Naturalism, science and pleasure, coincide on this point: it is always a matter of denouncing the illusion, the false infinite, the infinity of religion and all of the theologico-erotic-oneiric myths in which it is expressed.

The eye binds light, is itself a bound light. This binding is a reproductive synthesis, a Habitus.

When someone asks 'what's the use of philosophy?' the reply must be aggressive, since the question tries to be ironic and caustic. Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church, who have other concerns. It serves no established power.

Substance must itself be said of the modes and only of the modes.

The body of the woman is the overwhelming triumph of flesh. The woman is a concrete universal; she is a world, not an externalized world, but under the world, the warm interiority of the world, a compressed internalized world.

An exhausted man is much more than a weary man. Does he exhaust the possible because he is himself exhausted, or is he exhausted because he has exhausted the possible? He exhausts himself by exhausting the possible, and inversely.

In many ways the Palestinians are the new Indians, the Indians of Israel.

The virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual.

What we should in fact do, is stop allowing philosophers to reflect 'on' things. The philosopher creates, he doesn't reflect.

I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist.

The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy which saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy. It is useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into something shameful. Its only use is the exposure of all forms of baseness of thought.

Academics' lives are seldom interesting.

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

The philosopher creates, he doesn't reflect.

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.

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.

My eye, my brain, are images, parts of my body. How could my brain contain images since it is one image among others?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.

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

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

Underneath all reason lies delirium and drift.

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

Bring something incomprehensible into the world!

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.