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.
Browse Gilles Deleuze by topic
Gilles Deleuze on Freedom
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“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.”
from Essays Critical and Clinical , p. 104.
Gilles Deleuze on Knowledge
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Attributed to Gilles Deleuze:
“Philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts.”
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Attributed to Gilles Deleuze:
“A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds.”
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Attributed to Gilles Deleuze:
“How else can one write but of those things which one doesn't know, or knows badly?”
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“There's no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”
from Postscript on the Societies of Control -
“from Postscript on the Societies of Control”
There's no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. -
“from Essays Critical and Clinical , p. 104.”
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. -
“from Dialogues with Claire Parnet, p. 147 [emphasis in original].”
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 consistence which undermines the plane of organization of the World and the States? -
“from I have Nothing to Admit”
A book is a small cog in a much more complex, external machinery. Writing is a flow among others; it enjoys no special privilege and enters into relationships of current and counter-current, of back-wash with other flows — the flows of shit, sperm, speech, action, eroticism, money, politics, etc. Like Bloom, writing on the sand with one hand and masturbating with the other — two flows in what rela -
“Nietzsche’s break with Schopenhauer rests on precisely this point; it is a matter of knowing whether the will is unitary or multiple.”
Nietzsche and Philosophy(1962) | p. 7
Gilles Deleuze on Life
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“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 consistence which undermines the plane of organization of the World and the States?”
from Dialogues with Claire Parnet, p. 147 [emphasis in original].
Gilles Deleuze on Love
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“Schizophrenia is like love: there is no specifically schizophrenic phenomenon or entity; schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring machines, universal primary production as "the essential reality of man and nature"”
Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia(1977) | The Desiring Machine
Gilles Deleuze on Mind
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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
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Attributed to Gilles Deleuze:
“Becoming is the action by which something or someone is ceaselessly becoming-other while continuing to be what they are.”
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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
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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.”
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Attributed to Gilles Deleuze:
“There is no ideology and never has been.”
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“A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.”
from L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze: G comme Gauche (“Gilles Deleuze's Alphabet Book: Left-wing Politics”), 1988–1989. -
“from L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze: G comme Gauche (“Gilles Deleuze's Alphabet Book: Left-wing Politics”), 1988–1989.”
A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments. -
“A book is a small cog in a much more complex, external machinery. Writing is a flow among others; it enjoys no special privilege and enters into relationships of current and counter-current, of back-wash with other flows — the flows of shit, sperm, speech, action, eroticism, money, politics, etc. Like Bloom, writing on the sand with one hand and masturbating with the other — two flows in what relationship?”
from I have Nothing to Admit
Gilles Deleuze on Truth
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“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.”
Nietzsche and Philosophy(1962) | p. 1