Gilles Deleuze Quotes

46 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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. Everywhere it is machines — real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
The aim of critique is not the ends of man or of reason but in the end the Overman, the overcome, overtaken man. The point of critique is not justification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility

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

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
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 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

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

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
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
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