Gilles 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

I feel like one of the things I'm trying most to do is stretch my empathetic reach, as far as it will go. I got as far as Gilles de Rais' assistant, for example, and not really as far as de Rais himself. — Jim Shepard

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

Eros and Thanatos were always the source of his inspiration, even though, from this time on, they usually appear in the guise of two simple and fundamental themes: flowers and women. These themes offered him the greatest opportunity to give a certain permanence to all that can be grasped in passing: an ephemeral sensual joy, the ecstasy of life. — Gilles Neret

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

Gilles Duceppe avoids making campaign promises altogether so he can emphasize that his Bloc Quebecois has only one objective: to prevent Harper from forming a majority government. — Martin O'Malley

If someone said to me that you can have three wishes, my first would have been to get into racing, my second to be in Formula 1, my third to drive for Ferrari. — Gilles Villeneuve

As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze put it, no painter ever stands before a completely blank canvas, no author ever sits before a blank page. In fact, the surface confronting the modern artist is full of inherited images that must first be cleared from the imagination before one can begin to create one's own. — Marie Luise Knott

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

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

Sometimes someone feels like nothing goes their way, and then something really good happens. For me, hearing that I made someone happy makes me feel so alive! — Gilles Marini

Being a sick man is like being a log caught in a stream, Gilles. All the straws gather around it. — Helen Waddell

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

Medicine may be defined as the art or the science of keeping a patient quiet with frivolous reasons for his illness and amusing him with remedies good or bad until nature kills him or cures him. — Gilles Menage

Surfactants allow us to protect a water surface and to generate these beautiful soap bubbles, which are the delight of our children. — Pierre-Gilles De Gennes

To those who say that escaping is not courageous, we answer: what is not escape and social investment at the same time? — Gilles Deleuze Felix Guattari

Even before I started photography, I began to see that there was a disjunction between available languages and reality. — Gilles Peress

Faith in the Trinity rests on God's revelation of himself in the economy of salvation. We do not have access to the Trinity outside what God revealed to us by sending his own Son and giving us his Holy Spirit. This point is crucial. — Gilles Emery

Quit while there is still time - at about 12 or 13 years of age! — Gilles Gratton

I will drive flat out all the time. I love racing. — Gilles Villeneuve

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

Without a positive representation in the mythos to consolidate its sociocultural existence, homosexuality remains completely vulnerable to a resurgence of homophobia and scapegoating. — Gilles Herrada

Being exhausted is much more than being tired. — 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

We are bored in the city, to still discover mysteries on the signs along the street, latest state of humor and poetry, requires getting damned tired...

Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov) — Tom McDonough

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

Usually a fiber, after being dipped in a liquid, shows a string of droplets, and thus, for some time, people thought that most common fibers were non-wettable. — Pierre-Gilles De Gennes

We leave to monsieur Le Corbusier his style that suits factories as well as it does hospitals. And the prisons of the future: is he not already building churches? I do not know what this individual
ugly of countenance and hideous in his conceptions of the world
is repressing to make him want thus to crush humanity under ignoble heaps of reinforced concrete, a noble material that ought to permit an aerial articulation of space superior to Flamboyant Gothic. His power of cretinization is vast. A model by Corbusier is the only image that brings to my mind the idea of immediate suicide. With him moreover any remaining job will fade. And love
passion
liberty.
Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov) — Tom McDonough

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 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

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

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

Look at what has occurred in history. When the Berlin Wall fell, it was not surprising, but it was unexpected. Who predicted the Arab Spring? Nobody expected it, but all the ingredients were there. I think all the ingredients are also there for Quebec to become a country. But when? That's another question. — Gilles Duceppe

Anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool. — Gilles Deleuze

The difference between a 20-something and a 30-something man? Wisdom. At 20 years old, we don't really get how sensitive and beautiful women are. By 30, we're finally starting to learn. — Gilles Marini

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

The reason why borrowed books are seldom returned, is that it is easier to retain books themselves than what is inside of them. — Gilles Menage

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

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

In the end, love is growing up. We feel so much stronger since we are together in this life, than when we were before trying to figure it out alone. Love is all! — Gilles Marini

We only live once, and how would you want to be remembered? I have kids. I have, due to my job, a probably higher responsibility to do good things in my life. But also, since I was a kid, I love doing things out of context, helping friends, being different, being a special kind of man is important for me. — Gilles Marini

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

I love to dance and perform the Argentine tango - it breathes love! — Gilles Marini

Gilles Deleuze believed that every society needed a madman so we could feel better about ourselves. I do my best to fill that role. — George Singleton

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

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

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

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

We are entering into an age in which visual language is defined by a dialogue between photographers and audiences. This means not just the democratic posting of images but the democratic interpretation of images. — Gilles Peress

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

Everyone wavers between the emotionally still-alive past ad the already dead future.

Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov) — Tom McDonough

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

Communism is the end of the economy as a separate and privileged field on which everything else depends while despising and fearing it. — Gilles Dauve

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

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

If you accuse a man of murder, you might be believed, but if you accuse him of eating children for lunch and dinner like Gilles de Rais, no one will take you seriously. — Umberto Eco

This intensely lyrical vision of the pregant woman in [i]Hope I[i] is set in an ambiguous context peopled with masks, death's heads and allegorical monsters such as Sin, Disease, Poverty and Death, all threatening the incipient life. — Gilles Neret

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

The essential property of insoluble bilayers is that they optimise their area at fixed surfactant number. — Pierre-Gilles De Gennes

I don't trust words. I trust pictures. — Gilles Peress

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

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

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

A mild attack of apoplexy may be called death's retaining fee. — Gilles Menage

The morality of customs,the spirit of the laws, produces the man emancipated from the law. — 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

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

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

In biblical times, I stoned people to death. Now they are repaying me by hurling pucks at my head. — Gilles Gratton

Why would it be ridiculous that Quebec has an army? — Gilles Duceppe

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

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

The incarnation, passion, and resurrection of the Son do not modify the Trinity. In becoming man, the Son 'enhanced human nature without diminishing the divine.' 'Even when the Word takes a body from Mary, the Trinity remains a Trinity, with neither increase nor decrease. It is forever perfect. — Gilles Emery

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

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

I think I've got a peculiar disease. I call it the curse of history, and it has to do with the fugitive absence/presence of both personal and collective memory. At first I thought it was a kind of personal illness, just related to time, private time, time that passes in one's life. So I decided to forget and throw myself into the future. — Gilles Peress

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

It's a falsehood to state that francophone communities are thriving. — Gilles Duceppe

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

She arched an eyebrow. "You already know?" "I stole his soul, lost his soul, exorcised his soul from another person's body, stuffed him in a bottle, pulled a short con, and now the Choir thinks I'm Gilles de Rais." Pixie just stared at me. She rested her palms on the tabletop. "You have got," she said, "to do a better job of keeping me in the loop." "It's been a really busy couple of days. — Craig Schaefer

Nothing is wrong about giving a rose to someone you like or love. — Gilles Marini

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

I don't care so much anymore about 'good photography'; I am gathering evidence for history. — Gilles Peress