Quotes by Gilles Deleuze

“The philosopher creates, he doesnt reflect.”

Bring something incomprehensible into the world!

A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.

If youre trapped in the dream of the Other, youre fucked.

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

In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.

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

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

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.

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.

Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy.

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.

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?

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

A leftist government doesnt exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.

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

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

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

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