Gilles Deleuze Quotes

Bring something incomprehensible into the world!

~ 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

If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.

~ Gilles Deleuze

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

~ Gilles Deleuze

In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.

~ Gilles Deleuze

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

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

~ 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

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

Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy.

~ Gilles Deleuze

It is not by means of a metaphor that a banking or stock-market transaction, a claim, a coupon, a credit, is able to arouse people who are not necessarily bankers. And what about the effects of money that grows, money that produces more money? There are socioeconomic complexes that are also veritable complexes of the unconscious, and that communicate a voluptuous wave from the top to the bottom of their hierarchy (the military-industrial complex). And ideology, Oedipus, and the phallus have nothing to do with this, because they depend on it rather than being its impetus. For it is a matter of flows, of stocks, of breaks in and fluctuations of flows; desire is present wherever something flows and runs, carrying along with it interested subjects—but also drunken or slumbering subjects—toward lethal destinations.

~ Gilles Deleuze

Deleuze and Guattari have been totally misunderstood because the following has been wrenched from context: 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. (112)They are NOT advocating for this sort of prescriptive approach to language; rather, they are describing the social system around language--how language is a political tool. Why persist in quoting them as though they are promoting some sort of linguistic purity?

~ Gilles Deleuze

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

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

~ Gilles Deleuze

The best one can hope for is a government favorable to certain claims and demands from the Left.

~ Gilles Deleuze

A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds.

~ Gilles Deleuze

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

~ Gilles Deleuze

Here all guilt ceases, for it cannot cling to such flowers as these.

~ Gilles Deleuze