Gilles Deleuze Quotes & Sayings

The folding or doubling is itself a Memory: the 'absolute memory' or the memory of the outside, beyond the brief memory inscribed in strata and archives, beyond the relics remaining in the diagrams. — Gilles Deleuze

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password. — Gilles Deleuze

Philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts . — 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

Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater! — 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

This is how it should be done: lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. — Gilles Deleuze

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here all guilt ceases, for it cannot cling to such flowers as these. — Gilles Deleuze

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

A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. — Gilles Deleuze

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

It's a strange business, speaking for yourself, because it doesn't at all come with seeing yourself as an ego or a person or a subject. — Gilles Deleuze

Drunkenness as a triumphant irruption of the plant in us. — Gilles Deleuze

As for being responsible or irresponsible, we don't recognize those notions, they're for policemen and courtroom psychiatrists. — Gilles Deleuze

Deleuze and Guattari have been totally misunderstood because the following has been wrenched from context: "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." (112)
They are NOT advocating for this sort of prescriptive approach to language; rather, they are describing the social system around language--how language is a political tool. Why persist in quoting them as though they are promoting some sort of linguistic purity? — Gilles Deleuze

What counts is the question, of what is a body capable? And thereby he sets out one of the most fundamental questions in his whole philosophy (before him there had been Hobbes and others) by saying that the only question is that we don't even know [savons] what a body is capable of, we prattle on about the soul and the mind and we don't know what a body can do. — Gilles Deleuze

A great writer is always like a foreigner in the language which he expresses himself, even if this is his native tongue. At the limit, he draws his strength from a mute and unknown minority that belongs only to him. He is a foreigner in his own language: he does not mix another language with his own language, he carves out a nonpreexistent foreign language within his own language. He makes the language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur. — Gilles Deleuze

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

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

Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus. And rest assured that it works. — Gilles Deleuze

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

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

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

Bring something incomprehensible into the world! — Gilles Deleuze

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

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

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

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

In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing. — 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

The rite, the becoming-animal of the scapegoat clearly illustrates this: a first expiatory animal is sacrificed, but a second is driven away, sent out into the desert wilderness. In the signifying regime, the scapegoat represents a new form of increasing entropy in the system of signs: it is charged with everything that was "bad" in a given period, that is, everything that resisted signifying signs, everything that eluded the referral from sign to sign through the different circles; it also assumes everything that was unable to recharge the signifier as its center and carries off everything that spills beyond the outermost circle. — Gilles Deleuze

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

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

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

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

Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church, who have other concerns. It serves no established power. The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy that saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy. It is useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into something shameful. — Gilles Deleuze

What does belief applied to the unconscious signify? What is an unconscious that no longer does anything but believe, rather than produce? What are the operations, the artifices that inject the unconscious with 'beliefs' that are not even rational, but on the contrary only too reasonable and consistent with the established order? — Gilles Deleuze

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

We head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and we return with bloodshot eyes, yet they are the eyes of the mind. — 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

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

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

The schizophrenic delirium lays bare the material processes of the unconscious — 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 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 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

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

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

The best one can hope for is a government favorable to certain claims and demands from the Left. — Gilles Deleuze

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

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

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

Perhaps this is the supreme act of philosophy: not so much to think THE plane of immanence as to show that it is there, unthought in every plane, and to think it in this way as the outside and inside of thought, as the not-external outside and the not internal inside--that which cannot be thought and yet must be thought, which was thought once, as Christ was incarnated once, in order to show, that one time, the possibility of the impossible. — Gilles Deleuze

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

Being exhausted is much more than being tired. — Gilles Deleuze

Underneath all reason lies delirium and drift. — Gilles Deleuze

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

There are, you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you're even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on and on. Or there's the other way: you see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is "Does it work, and how does it work?" How does it work for you? If it doesn't work, if nothing comes through, you try another book. This second way of reading's intensive: something comes through or it doesn't. There's nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. — 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

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

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

Belief is necessarily something false that diverts and suffocates effective production — Gilles Deleuze

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

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

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

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

The link between man and the world is broken. Henceforth, this link must become an object of belief: it is the impossible which can only be restored within a faith. Belief is no longer addressed to a different or transformed world. Man is in the world as if in a pure optical and sound situation. The reaction of which man has been dispossessed can be replaced only by belief. Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears. The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link. — Gilles Deleuze

Besides, it is doubtful that incest was a real obstacle to the establishment of society, as the partisans of an exchangist conception claim ... The real danger is elsewhere. If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire ... is capable of calling into question the established order of society ... it is revolutionary in its essence ... It is therefore of vital importance for a society to repress desire, and even to find something more efficient than repression, so that repression, hierarchy, exploitation, and servitude are themselves desired ... that does not at all mean that desire is something other than sexuality, but that sexuality and love do not live in the bedroom of Oedipus, they dream instead of wide-open spaces, and ... do not let themselves be stocked within an established order. — 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

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

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

Identity and resemblance would then be no more than inevitable illusions - in other words, concepts of reflection which would account for our inveterate habit of thinking difference on the basis of the categories of representation. — Gilles Deleuze

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

Far from being a psychological trait, the spirit of revenge is the principle on which our whole psychology depends. — 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