Gilles Deleuze > Quotes

“If you're trapped in the dream of the other, you're fucked.”
― 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

“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, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”
― Gilles Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“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

“An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues II

“It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?”
― Gilles Deleuze

“The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation

“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.”
― 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, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is suppose to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political”
― Gilles Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

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

“Is it not first through the voice that one becomes animal?”
― Gilles Deleuze, Mille Plateaux

“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, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image

“Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“D.H. Lawrence had the impression – that psychoanalysis was shutting sexuality up in a bizarre sort of box painted with bourgeois motifs, in a kind of rather repugnant artificial triangle, thereby stifling the whole of sexuality as a production of desire so as to recast it along entirely different lines, making of it a ‘dirty little secret’, a dirty little family secret, a private theater rather than the fantastic factory of nature and production”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator—computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribed there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“belief is necessarily something false that diverts and suffocates effective production”
― 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, Dialogues

“Language is not made to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience newspapers, news, proceed by redundancy, in that they tell us what we ‘must’ think, retain, expect, etc. language is neither informational nor communicational. It is not the communication of information but something quite different: the transmission of order-words, either from one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the statement”
― Gilles Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“It is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center draws its power, hence their extreme maliciousness, and vanity”
― Gilles Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities”
― Gilles Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

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

“In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Psychoanalysis was from the start, still is, and perhaps always will be a well-constituted church and a form of treatment based on a set of beliefs that only the very faithful could adhere to, i.e., those who believe in a security that amounts to being lost in the herd and defined in terms of common and external goals”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“The annals of official philosophy are populated by ‘bureaucrats of pure reason’ who speak in ‘the shadow of the despot’ and are in historical complicity with the State. They invent ‘a properly spiritual…absolute State that… effectively functions in the mind.’ Theirs is a discourse of sovereign judgment, of stable subjectivity legislated by ‘good’ sense, of rocklike identity, ‘universal’ truth, and (white male) justice. ‘Thus the exercise of their thought is in conformity with the aims of the real State, with the dominant significations, and with the requirements of the established order.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“State philosophy reposes on a double identity: of the thinking subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The subjects, its concepts, and also the objects in the world to which the concepts are applied have a shared, internal essence: the self-resemblance at the basis of identity. Representational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspondence between these symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of judgment is the policeman of analogy, assuring that each of these terms is honestly itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought its end is truth, in action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are limitive distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties possessed by each term in contradistinction to the others: logos, law) and hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection of a term’s self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, man, god, or gold: value, morality). The modus operandi is negation: x = x = not y. Identity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for order. The established order, of course: philosophers have traditionally been employees of the State. The collusion between philosophy and the State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade of the nineteenth century with the foundation of the University of Berlin, which was to become the model of higher learning throughout Europe and in the United States. The goal laid out for it by Wilhelm von Humboldt (based on proposals by Fichte and Schleiermacher) was the ‘spiritual and moral training of the nation,’ to be achieved by ‘deriving everything from an original principle’ (truth), by ‘relating everything to an ideal’ (justice), and by ‘unifying this principle and this ideal to a single Idea’ (the State). The end product would be ‘a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society’ – each mind an analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the State. More insidious than the well-known practical cooperation between university and government (the burgeoning military funding of research) is its philosophical role in the propagation of the form of representational thinking itself, that ‘properly spiritual absolute State’ endlessly reproduced and disseminated at every level of the social fabric.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“The various forms of education or ‘normalization’ imposed upon an individual consist in making him or her change points of subjectification, always moving towards a higher, nobler one in closer conformity with the supposed ideal. Then from the point of subjectification issues a subject of enunciation, as a function of a mental reality determined by that point. Then from the subject of enunciation issues a subject of the statement, in other words, a subject bound to statements in conformity with a dominant reality”
― Gilles Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“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”
― Gilles Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Before being a mental state of the schizophrenic who has made himself into an artificial person through autism, schizophrenia is the process of the production of desire and desiring-machines.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“Si vous êtes pris dans le rêve de l‘autre; vous êtez foutus.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.”
― 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, Nietzsche and Philosophy

“The administration of a great organized molar security has as its correlate a whole micro-management of petty fears, a permanent molecular insecurity, to the point that the motto of domestic policymakers might be: a macropolitics of society by and for the micropolitics of insecurity”
― Gilles Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“In the literary machine that Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” constitutes, we are struck by the fact that all the parts are produced as asymmetrical sections, paths that suddenly come to an end, hermetically sealed boxes, noncommunicating vessels, watertight compartments, in which there are gaps even between things that are contiguous, gaps that are affirmations, pieces of a puzzle belonging not to any one puzzle but to many, pieces assembled by forcing them into a certain place where they may or may not belong, their unmatched edges violently forced out of shape, forcibly made to fit together, to interlock, with a number of pieces always left over.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“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.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation

“The great discovery of psychoanalysis was that of the production of desire, of the production of the unconscious. But once Oedipus entered the picture, the discovery was soon buried beneath the new brand of idealism: a classical theater was substituted for the unconscious as a factory: representation was substituted for the units of production of the unconscious; and an unconscious that was capable of nothing but expressing itself – in myth, tragedy, dreams – was substituted for the productive unconscious”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“What does belief applied to the unconscious signify? What is an unconscious that no longer does anything but believe, rather than produce? What are the operations, the artifices that inject the unconscious with ‘beliefs’ that are not even rational, but on the contrary only too reasonable and consistent with the established order?”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“The historical fact is that cinema was constituted as such by becoming narrative, by presenting a story, and by rejecting its other possible directions. The approximation which follows is that, from that point, the sequences of images and even each image, a single shot, are assimilated to propositions or rather oral utterances [...].”
― Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image

“Psychoanalysts are bent on producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture. It is Oedipus who produces man in this fashion and who gives a structure to the false movement of infinite progression and regression”
― Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“The morality of customs,the spirit of the laws, produces the man emancipated from the law.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy

“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

“the schizophrenic delirium lays bare the material processes of the unconscious”
― Gilles Deleuze

“Opening is an essential feature of univocity. The nomadic distributions or crowned anarchies in the univocal stand opposed to the sedentary distribution of analogy. Only there does the cry resound: ‘Everything is equal!’ and ‘Everything returns!’. However, this ‘Everything is equal!’ and ‘Everything returns!’ can be said only at the point in which the extremity of difference is reached. A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same Ocean for all the drops, a single clamour of Being for all beings: on the condition that each being, each drop, and each voice has reached the state of excess – in other words, the difference which displaces and disguises them and, in turning upon the mobile cusp, causes them to return.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

“... it is no longer an organism that functions but a BwO that is constructed. No longer are there acts to explain, dreams or phantasies to interpret, childhood memories to recall, words to make signify; instead there are colors and sounds, becomings and intensities (and when you become-dog, don't ask if the dog you are playing with is a dream or a reality, if it is 'your goddam mother' or something else entirely).”
― Gilles Deleuze