Gilles Deleuze quotes

Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher known for his influential works on philosophy, literature, and art. His collaborations with Félix Guattari produced groundbreaking concepts like "rhizome" and "becoming." He inspired generations of thinkers with his unique approach to subjectivity, politics, and creativity. Here are 35 of his quotes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in firs 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. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it.

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

Bring something incomprehensible into the world!

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

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

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

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

Gilles Deleuze

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

Gilles Deleuze

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

Gilles Deleuze

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

Gilles Deleuze

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

Gilles Deleuze

In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.

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

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

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