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, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“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 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, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

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

“The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation

“Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater!”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“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, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“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.”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“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, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“The Couple Overfloweth

We sometimes go on as though people can’t express themselves. In fact they’re always expressing themselves. The sorriest couples are those where the woman can’t be preoccupied or tired without the man saying “What’s wrong? Say something…,” or the man, without the woman saying … and so on. Radio and television have spread this spirit everywhere, and we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people 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, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying. What we’re plagued by these days isn’t any blocking of communication, but pointless statements. But what we call the meaning of a statement is its point. That’s the only definition of meaning, and it comes to the same thing as a statement’s novelty. You can listen to people for hours, but what’s the point? . . . That’s why arguments are such a strain, why there’s never any point arguing. You can’t just tell someone what they’re saying is pointless. So you tell them it’s wrong. But what someone says is never wrong, the problem isn’t that some things are wrong, but that they’re stupid or irrelevant. That they’ve already been said a thousand times. The notions of relevance, necessity, the point of something, are a thousand times more significant than the notion of truth. Not as substitutes for truth, but as the measure of the truth of what I’m saying. It’s the same in mathematics: Poincaré used to say that many mathematical theories are completely irrelevant, pointless; He didn’t say they were wrong – that wouldn’t have been so bad.

(Negotiations)”
― Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990

“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

“You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.”
― 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, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

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

“So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people 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, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990

“An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues II

“There’s no democratic state that’s not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery.”
― 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, Nietzsche and Philosophy

“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, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“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.”
― Deleuze and Guattari

“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

“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

“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

“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, Nietzsche and Philosophy

“What does it mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates, whether it be through the family only or through something else; then to find that person's own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person's. Heavenly nuptials, multiplicities of multiplicities. Every love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be formed, and it is at the highest point of this depersonalization that some- one can be named, receives his or her family name or first name, acquires the most intense discernibility in the instantaneous apprehension of the multiplicities belonging to him or her, and to which he or she belongs. A pack of freckles on a face, a pack of boys speaking through the voice of a woman, a clutch of girls in Charlus's voice, a horde of wolves in somebody's throat, a multiplicity of anuses in the anus, mouth, or eye one is intent upon. We each go through so many bodies in each other.”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia