Gilles Deleuze Quotes

46 Sourced Quotes

According to Beckett's or Kafka's law, there is immobility beyond movement: beyond standing up, there is sitting down, and beyond sitting down, lying down, beyond which one finally dissipates.

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

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

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
A book is a small cog in a much more complex, external machinery. Writing is a flow among others; it enjoys no special privilege and enters into relationships of current and counter-current, of back-wash with other flows — the flows of shit, sperm, speech, action, eroticism, money, politics, etc. Like Bloom, writing on the sand with one hand and masturbating with the other — two flows in what relationship?

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

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

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

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
Belief is necessarily something false that diverts and suffocates effective production

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

Gilles Deleuze
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