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.

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

Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive, nor communicative. They are creative, that's all.

Intuition is neither a feeling, an inspiration nor a disorderly sympathy but a fully developed method.

Underneath all reason lies delirium and drift.

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.

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

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

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.

Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency.

There’s no democratic state that’s not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery.

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

Bring something incomprehensible into the world!

Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?

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

Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.

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.

Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject.

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

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

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.

You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.

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

It is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center draws its power, hence their extreme maliciousness, and vanity

Photography, if there is photography, is already snapped, already shot, in the very interior of things and for all points of space.

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

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

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.

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.

Either it is the fold of the infinite, or the constant folds [replis] of finitude which curve the outside and constitute the inside.

The philosopher creates, he doesn't reflect.

In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.

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?

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

My eye, my brain, are images, parts of my body. How could my brain contain images since it is one image among others?

What is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password.

I believe strongly that philosophy has nothing to do with specialists.

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

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.

The percept is the landscape before man, in the absence of man.

As for being responsible or irresponsible, we don't recognize those notions, they're for policemen and courtroom psychiatrists.

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

belief is necessarily something false that diverts and suffocates effective production

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.

Nietzsche's break with Schopenhauer rests on precisely this point; it is a matter of knowing whether the will is unitary or multiple.

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

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

Is it not first through the voice that one becomes animal?

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

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