Top 88 Deleuze Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. When, in the works of Lacan, Deleuze and Althusser, the nonsense machine began to crank out its impenetrable sentences, of which nothing could be understood except that they all had "capitalism" as their target, it looked as though Nothing had at last found its voice.
Roger Scruton
#5. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. A creator is someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities.
Gilles Deleuze
#11. Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater!
Gilles Deleuze
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. The morality of customs,the spirit of the laws, produces the man emancipated from the law.
Gilles Deleuze
#15. 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
#16. Things never pass where you think, nor along the paths you think
Gilles Deleuze
#17. Images exist; things themselves are images ... Images constantly act on and react to one another, produce and consume. There is no difference between images, things and movement ...
Gilles Deleuze
#18. The best one can hope for is a government favorable to certain claims and demands from the Left.
Gilles Deleuze
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. There's no democratic state that's not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery.
Gilles Deleuze
#22. 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
#23. Intuition is neither a feeling, an inspiration nor a disorderly sympathy but a fully developed method.
Gilles Deleuze
#24. 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
#25. Before being a mental state of the schizophrenic who has made himself into an artificial person through autism, schizophrenia is the process of the production of desire and desiring-machines.
Gilles Deleuze
#26. I haven't got the normal protective whorls, so that touching anything, especially fabric, causes such irritation that I need long nails to protect them.
Gilles Deleuze
#27. 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
#28. The schizophrenic delirium lays bare the material processes of the unconscious
Gilles Deleuze
#29. As for being responsible or irresponsible, we don't recognize those notions, they're for policemen and courtroom psychiatrists.
Gilles Deleuze
#30. 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
#31. The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities
Gilles Deleuze
#32. 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
#34. It's not easy to see things from the middle, rather than looking down on them from above or up at them from below, or from left to right or right to left: try it, you'll see that everything changes.
Gilles Deleuze
#35. 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
#36. 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.
Gilles Deleuze
#37. 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
#38. It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.
Gilles Deleuze
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking.
Gilles Deleuze
#44. A tyrant institutionalises stupidity, but he is the first servant of his own system and the first to be installed within it.
Gilles Deleuze
#45. The albatross' big feet and its great white wings are the same thing.
Giles Deleuze
#46. It's a strange business, speaking for yourself, because it doesn't at all come with seeing yourself as an ego or a person or a subject.
Gilles Deleuze
#48. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy.
Gilles Deleuze
#53. 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
#54. Here all guilt ceases, for it cannot cling to such flowers as these.
Gilles Deleuze
#55. Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand. Desiring-machines or the nonhuman sex: not one or even two sexes, but n sexes.
Gilles Deleuze
#56. Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus. And rest assured that it works.
Gilles Deleuze
#57. The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor; all that consists is Real.
Gilles Deleuze
#58. What is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password.
Gilles Deleuze
#59. 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
#60. Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.
Gilles Deleuze
#61. You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.
Gilles Deleuze
#62. 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
#64. Is it not first through the voice that one becomes animal?
Gilles Deleuze
#65. There's no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.
Gilles Deleuze
#66. Can you harness the power of drugs without them taking over, without turning into a dazed zombie?
Gilles Deleuze
#67. 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
#68. Evaluations, in essence, are ... ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate.
Gilles Deleuze
#69. Far from being a psychological trait, the spirit of revenge is the principle on which our whole psychology depends.
Gilles Deleuze
#71. A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.
Gilles Deleuze
#72. Belief is necessarily something false that diverts and suffocates effective production
Gilles Deleuze
#73. 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
#74. Drunkenness as a triumphant irruption of the plant in us.
Gilles Deleuze
#75. If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.
Gilles Deleuze
#76. A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds.
Gilles Deleuze
#77. I believe strongly that philosophy has nothing to do with specialists.
Gilles Deleuze
#78. Reading something from beginning to end. That is reading with love.
Gilles Deleuze
#79. The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?
Gilles Deleuze
#80. Photography, if there is photography, is already snapped, already shot, in the very interior of things and for all points of space.
Gilles Deleuze
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.
Gilles Deleuze
#84. Philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts .
Gilles Deleuze
#85. 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
#86. The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.
Gilles Deleuze
#87. The city seems to be a labyrinth that can be ordered. The world is an infinite series of curvatures or inflections, and the entire world is enclosed in the soul from one point of view.
Gilles Deleuze
#88. It is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center draws its power, hence their extreme maliciousness, and vanity
Gilles Deleuze
