Gilles Deleuze Quotes

The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.

The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself. Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I have no admiration for culture. I have no reserve knowledge, no provisional knowledge. And everything that I learn, I learn for a particular task, and once it's done, I immediately forget it, so that if ten years later, I have to get involved with something close to or directly within the same subject, I would have to start again from zero, with some few exceptions.

The law is not known, since there is nothing in it to know. We come across it only through its action, and it acts only through its sentence and its execution. It is not distinguishable from the application. We know it only through its imprint on our heart and our flesh: we are guilty, necessarily guilty. Guilt is like the moral thread which duplicates the thread of time.

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

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

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

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.

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