1001Philosophers

Gilles Deleuze Quotes

Gilles Deleuze was a 20th-century French philosopher, one of the most influential figures of post-structuralist continental philosophy. His early monographs on Hume, Bergson, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Kant, and Foucault each developed an idiosyncratic reading aimed at extracting a usable conceptual machinery from the canonical figure. The quotes below are attributed to Gilles Deleuze, organized by topic.

Gilles Deleuze on Knowledge

  • Attributed to Gilles Deleuze:

    “Philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts.”

  • Attributed to Gilles Deleuze:

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

  • Attributed to Gilles Deleuze:

    “How else can one write but of those things which one doesn't know, or knows badly?”

Gilles Deleuze on Mind

  • Attributed to Gilles Deleuze:

    “What we are saying about the schizo is true also of the artist: it is not by becoming-other that the artist creates, but by liberating the becomings within.”

Gilles Deleuze on Nature

  • Attributed to Gilles Deleuze:

    “Becoming is the action by which something or someone is ceaselessly becoming-other while continuing to be what they are.”

  • Attributed to Gilles Deleuze:

    “Multiplicity must not designate a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organisation belonging to the many as such, which has no need whatsoever of unity in order to form a system.”

Gilles Deleuze on Politics

  • Attributed to Gilles Deleuze:

    “We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.”

  • Attributed to Gilles Deleuze:

    “There is no ideology and never has been.”