Deleuze Philosophy Quotes & Sayings

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

Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another. — Milan Kundera

Referring to a mask as a law of nature is another way of saying that it cannot be escaped or transcended; there is no getting beyond or beneath it. But when Deleuze describes the intention of interpretation, we find it is 'an art of piercing masks, of discovering the one that masks himself, why he does it and the point of keeping up the mask while it is being reshaped'." The Nietzschean-inspired disavowal of ideology is based on the claim that critique is only an ongoing series of interpretations where masks give way to nothing but more of their own. Deleuze's instruction is to pierce masks so that motivations and strategies can be discovered, whether they belong to subjects or to a particular manifestation of power. The obvious implication is that the appearance of a mask obscures other qualities that are potentially more fundamental than just another mask. — John Grant

The philosopher must become non-philosopher so that non-philosophy becomes the earth and people of philosophy. — Gilles Deleuze Felix Guattari

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

Philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts . — Gilles Deleuze

He looked at her, and the clarity of his dark eyes struck her heart with a sensation of a wound touched. — Shannon Hale

[1.] And first I suppose that there is diffused through all places an aethereal substance capable of contraction & dilatation, strongly elastick, & in a word, much like air in all respects, but far more subtile. 2. I suppose this aether pervades all gross bodies, but yet so as to stand rarer in their pores then in free spaces, & so much ye rarer as their pores are less ... 3. I suppose ye rarer aether within bodies & ye denser without them, not to be terminated in a mathematical superficies, but to grow gradually into one another. — Isaac Newton

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

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

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

In a king, modesty would be a sign of weakness. — Jose Saramago

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

Minutes after the shootings, everybody's cell phone rang. — Francine Prose

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

Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy. — Gilles Deleuze

But nothing is crueler than a coward, and the slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining. — Cormac McCarthy

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

If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked. — 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

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

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

One gets the sense that, for Deleuze, the cinema of the movement-image has been fully realized while that of the time-image is emergent. Comparatively speaking, there are few "pure" examples of films where direct images of time predominate. Mixed or hybrid examples are more common. — D. N. Rodowick

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 their silence they continued both to protect me and to punish me. The memory of that night was now the only tie between us, eclipsing everything else. — Jhumpa Lahiri