The 65 best famous phrases of Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze is a famous French philosopher born during the year 1925 in the beautiful city of Paris.
As one of the most celebrated philosophers of the 20th century, Deleuze wrote during his career as writer on topics as varied as for example: history of philosophy, politics, art and literature. The work of this excellent writer and his particular fight against capitalism made him a clear benchmark within his specialization.
Later, with his tragic death in 1995, he shocked the entire European philosophical community, which was orphaned by one of his most relevant figures.
- We recommend you read: "The 70 best phrases of Félix Guattari"
Phrases and reflections by Gilles Deleuze
Would you like to know the most relevant phrases of this famous philosopher? Below you can enjoy the 65 best phrases of Gilles Deleuze, a clear reference in the political philosophy of the 20th century.
1. Art is what resists: it resists death, servitude, infamy, shame.
Art can accompany us in all situations of our life, even in the most complicated ones.
2. Ears are lacking to listen to what one does not have access to from experience.
Personal experience is sometimes totally necessary to be able to understand something.
3. Writing is not imposing a form of expression on a lived material. Literature is next to the formless, the unfinished... Writing is a matter with the future, always unfinished, always ongoing, and that goes beyond any livable or lived material.
We could write forever, we are the ones who decide when to put an end to it.
4. We are taught that companies have a soul, which is, without a doubt, the most terrifying news in the world.
Companies are creations of capitalism, which only look out for their own survival. A company will never look out for the interests of its workers.
5. The traitor is very different from the cheat: the cheat seeks to take refuge in established property, conquer territory, and even establish a new order. The cheater has a lot of future, but he has not the slightest future.
Through the use of cheats we may perhaps reach our goal, but this goal can be taken from us in the same way.
6. Marketing is now the instrument of social control, and forms the impudent race of our masters.
At present, the marketing it has the ability to guide us along certain paths or to change our way of thinking, without a doubt it is a very dangerous tool which we must understand very well.
7. Not to carry life under the weight of higher values, even heroic ones, but to create new values that are those of life, that make life light or affirmative.
We must have values in life, but also be flexible with them. Having too high expectations can make us very unhappy people.
8. Many young people strangely claim to be motivated, they ask for more courses, more permanent training: they it corresponds to discover what they are used for, as their elders discovered, not without effort, the purpose of the disciplines. The coils of a snake are even more complicated than the holes of a molehill.
Young people have the difficult task of innovating in a world saturated with technology; they hold the key to their future.
9. When a body meets a different body or an idea with a different one, it happens either that their relations compose forming a more powerful whole, or else that one of these decomposes the other and destroys the cohesion of its parts.
Indeed, people, like States or Nations, interact positively with each other or tend, on the contrary, to destroy each other.
10. A creator is a being who works for pleasure.
He who performs a work for pure pleasure, will undoubtedly take more care in its realization.
11. Meaning is never a beginning or origin, but a product. You don't have to discover it, restore it, or replace it, but you have to produce it using new machinery.
Capitalism always seeks the creation of new products which can be sold, the product is the engine that turns the wheel of capitalism.
12. When you have a sad affection, it is because a body acts on yours, a soul acts on yours in such conditions and under a relationship that is not appropriate with yours. Since then, nothing in sadness can induce him to form the common notion, that is, the idea of something common between two bodies and two souls.
We must know how to get rid of those relationships that do not contribute anything positive to our lives.
13. Each one of us has his line of the universe to discover, but he does not discover it for himself but by tracing it, tracing his rough line.
We all have our own path in life and we can only know where it leads us by following it.
14. It is true that philosophy is inseparable from a certain anger against its times, but also that it guarantees us serenity. Nevertheless, philosophy is not a Power. Religions, States, capitalism, science, law, opinion or television are powers, but not philosophy.
Philosophy is a tool that can provide us with knowledge, how we use that knowledge will depend on us.
15. Desire is revolutionary because it always wants more connections and more arrangements.
Human desire can be in many cases something totally insatiable, since human beings always want to have more goods and be able to experience more pleasures.
16. The characteristic of the capitalist machine is to make the debt infinite.
That people get into debt is totally necessary so that this spiral of consumption never stops, for this there is a very important player in this macabre game: the banks.
17. The sublime man no longer needs God to subdue man. He has replaced God with humanism; the ascetic ideal for the moral ideal and knowledge. Man invests himself in the name of heroic values, in the name of human values.
Men have tended towards hedonism since ancient times, we tend to believe that we are some kind of superior being within creation. We must be more humble and realistic, the life we live is a great gift that we must take advantage of.
18. The really big problems are only raised when they are solved.
In order to solve a big problem, we must first be fully aware of it, if we are not aware, we will not be able to solve it.
19. Philosophy has never been restricted to philosophy professors. He is a philosopher who becomes a philosopher, that is, who is interested in those creations so peculiar to the order of concepts.
We can all be, in part, philosophers, whenever we decide to dedicate time of our lives to this particular study of the problems that concern man.
20. Every sensation is a question, even when only silence answers.
When we have a certain sensation, we know that something is happening or is going to happen. Intuition is something that can help us a lot in life.
21. The space traversed is past, movement is present, it is the act of traversing. The space traversed is divisible, and even infinitely divisible, while the movement is indivisible, or else it does not divide without changing, with each division, its nature.
During our life we only have a brief space of time in which to act, that space of time is now. Let's live in the now with all our being!
22. They plant trees in our heads: the one of life, the one of knowledge, etc. Everyone claims roots. The power of submission is always arborescent.
Since we are born they try to introduce ideas into our minds, which are necessary to be subjugated by society. We must not let ourselves be carried away by the ideas or interests of others, we must live as we wish.
23. Those who read Nietzsche without laughing and without laughing a lot, without laughing often, and sometimes out loud, it's as if they didn't read him.
In this sentence, Deleuze makes us this satire on Nietzsche, his political ideas were totally contrary to each other.
24. It is always written to give life, to free life wherever it is imprisoned, to draw lines of flight.
Writing is a hobby that can allow us to organize our own ideas, we should all write more every day.
25. Who are the television customers? They are no longer the listeners: the television customers are the advertisers; they are the real advertisers. Listeners get what advertisers want…
Television channels are run by large corporations or business groups, these channels will say what interests their investors. Honesty is conspicuous by its absence on television.
26. I try to explain that things, people, are made up of very diverse lines, and that they always know what line of themselves they are on, nor where to pass the line they are on plotting; In a word, that in people there is a whole geography, with hard, flexible and vanishing lines.
People are constantly influenced by various factors, many of which we are not even aware of.
27. Man is no longer the man locked up, but the man in debt.
Capitalism enslaves us through the use of debt, it is not necessary to put up bars today. We must not get carried away by the wild and unbridled capitalism of today.
28. A philosopher is not only someone who invents notions, he also invents ways of perceiving.
The personal perception of a philosopher greatly affects his own theories, no one is exempt from the influence of our own perception.
29. The secret of the eternal return consists in the fact that it does not express in any way an order that opposes chaos and subdues it. On the contrary, it is nothing other than chaos, the power to affirm chaos.
Chaos has always existed in the universe, even today we do not have answers for all the chaos that exists within it.
30. The explosion, the splendor of the event is the meaning. The event is not what happens (accident); it is in what happens the pure expressed that beckons us and waits for us. According to the three previous determinations, it is what must be understood, what must be wanted, what must be represented in what happens.
Our perception can show us a certain event, in a very different way from reality.
31. Drinking is a matter of quantity.
When we suffer from an alcoholism problem, we can end up drinking large amounts of alcohol on a daily basis. Our own body can ask us through a withdrawal syndrome for this substance.
32. But as conscious beings, we never apprehend anything... But the effects of these compositions and decompositions do: we experience joy when a body meets the ours and enters into composition with it, and sadness when, on the contrary, an organ or an idea threatens our own coherence.
We all want well-being for our own existence, and the problems that may arise during it will necessarily cause us great discomfort.
33. When you drink, what you want to get to is the last glass. Drinking is literally doing everything possible to access that last glass. That is what matters.
Alcoholism can lead us to lose control of our actions, making us fall into a vicious circle that is really difficult to abandon.
34. Posing the problem is not simply discovering, it is inventing.
In order to give a great answer to something, there must first be a great question to answer. Finding that question is already a great achievement in itself.
35. There is no place for fear, nor for hope. Searching new weapons is the only option left.
During any war conflict, being in the power of arms will be vital for our survival.
36. Emotion is creative, first of all, because it expresses the entire creation; secondly, because he creates the work in which he expresses himself; and finally, because it communicates to the viewers or listeners a bit of that creativity.
Expressing our emotions will allow us to create, through any method of communication, an artistic work.
37. A book is a small cog in a much more complex external machinery.
Books have great power, the power to give knowledge to everyone who reads it.
38. Desiring is building an assemblage, building a set, the set of a skirt, of a ray of sunshine...
Desires run our life to a large extent, we are slaves to our own desires.
39. The discovery concerns what already exists actually or virtually: it was, therefore, sure that sooner or later it had to come. Invention gives being to what was not and could never have come.
Indeed, a discovery reveals something that already exists today and an invention creates something new that did not exist before.
40. Only the act of resistance resists death, be it in the form of a work of art, be it in the form of a human struggle. And what relationship is there between the struggle of men and the work of art? The closest relationship and for me the most mysterious.
Art has always reflected man in all his facets, and in his fight against the injustice that torments him, it has also done so.
41. I don't consider myself an intellectual at all, I don't consider myself educated, for one simple reason, and that is that when I see someone educated, I am stunned. It's not so much about admiration, some aspects I admire, others I don't at all, I'm just blown away. Someone educated does not fail to attract attention: it is an amazing knowledge about everything.
We must value those intelligent people who surround us, because tomorrow they may be able to advise us on a subject that we do not master.
42. True freedom resides in a power of decision, of constituting the problems themselves: this semi-divine power implies both the disappearance of false problems and the creative emergence of the true: the truth is that, in philosophy and even in other fields, it is a question of finding the problem and, consequently, of posing it even more than of solve them.
Philosophy needs problems to solve in order to exist. Without problems to answer, philosophy is useless.
43. Proper names designate forces, events, movements and motives, winds, typhoons, diseases, places and moments before people. Verbs in the infinitive designate becomings and events that go beyond fashions and times.
It is we ourselves who with our actions decide the future of society.
44. Anarchy and unity are one and the same thing, not the unity of the One, but a stranger unity that can only be claimed from the multiple.
Anarchy is a political philosophy that has managed to endure over time to the present, being represented by people of all social classes.
45. Philosophy has always dealt with concepts, and doing philosophy is trying to create or invent concepts.
Philosophy as a creative force has enormous potential, society has been guided on countless occasions by the wise words of philosophers.
46. It is known that in Nietzsche, the theory of the superior man is a critique that intends to denounce the most deepest or most dangerous aspect of humanism: the superior man tries to bring humanity to perfection, to the culmination.
Nietzsche's theory of the so-called "superior man" is undoubtedly one of the most controversial in history, being the fundamental basis of various supremacist movements.
47. I was interested in movements, collective creations, and not so much in representations. In the institutions there is a whole movement that is distinguished from both laws and contracts.
Being inside institutions can teach us a way of understanding life that is different from how it is done on the street.
48. At first I was more interested in law than politics. I found in Hume a very creative conception of the institution and of law.
Law is one of the essential pillars by which a nation is created, a nation without law can never last over time.
49. It is not that I am interested in the law or the laws (law is an empty notion and laws are servile notions) or even the right to rights; What interests me is the jurisprudence.
Jurisprudence is a fundamental aspect of any state, how it is applied can greatly vary the lives of its citizens.
50. As for my transition to politics, I experienced it firsthand in May 1968, as I came into contact with precise problems and thanks to Guattari, thanks to Foucault, thanks to Elie Sambar. Anti-Oedipus was entirely a book of political philosophy.
This group of thinkers was undoubtedly the best of their time, who laid the foundations of many current intellectual currents.
51. Even today, the work of François Ewald to restore a philosophy of law seems essential to me.
Ewald was Michel Foucault's assistant during the 1970s, and his own work on the welfare state is widely commended today.
52. It is not about an opposition between the eternal and the historical, nor between contemplation and action: Nietzsche speaks of what is done, of the event itself or of becoming.
Like any good philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, studied in depth the work of his German counterpart. Friedrich Nietzsche.
53. Without history, experimentation would remain indeterminate, unconditioned, but experimentation is not historical.
History can help us choose which path to take, but our personal experiences can be just as important as the story itself.
54. I think neither Felix nor I abandoned Marxism, although in two different ways perhaps.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have always felt partly Marxist, but each in their own style.
55. Let's take the example of Europe today: Western politicians and technocrats have made an enormous effort to build it by standardizing regimes and regulations, but they What is beginning to surprise is, on the one hand, the explosions among young people, among women, in relation to the simple expansion of the limits (this is not technocratizable).
Times change and young people change with them, it is essential that institutions adapt to their needs.
56. Revolutionary movements and also artistic movements are like that, war machines.
People can change through organized social movements, the future of any nation.
57. In capitalism there is only one universal thing, the market.
For capitalism, the market and its control is the most important thing.
58. There is no universal State precisely because there is a universal market of which the States are centers or Stock Exchanges.
A State that adopts capitalism as an economic system will never be able to have full control over its own economy.
59. There is no democratic State that is not fully committed to this production of human misery.
The economic system that a State chooses for itself is much more important than any political organization.
60. Minorities and majorities are not distinguished by number. A minority can be larger than a majority. What defines the majority is a model to which one must conform: for example, average European, adult, male, city dweller. While a minority has no model, it is a becoming, a process.
A minority can be very large in terms of individuals, the problem is that they are not usually organized or well represented within society.
61. It can be said that the majority is nobody.
What makes up the so-called "majority" are a series of concepts, which an indeterminate number of individuals have in common.
62. When a minority creates models it is because they want to become the majority, and it is undoubtedly inevitable for their survival or salvation.
Any minority wishes to achieve by all means to take control of a territory, within that territory they themselves will be the majority.
63. Utopia is not a good concept: what exists is more of a fabulation common to the people and to art.
What we call a "utopia" may really be a simple fable. As Deleuze tells us, a utopia is not a good concept, since there can be as many different ones as there are people in the world.
64. We enter into control societies that no longer function by confinement but by continuous control and instantaneous communication.
At present we are controlled 24 hours a day, although sometimes we do not realize it.
65. The new cerebral openings, the new ways of thinking, are not explained by micro-surgery; however, science must strive to find out what may have happened in the brain when it starts to think differently.
In recent years, man has developed a different way of thinking than he did in the past. Will this have an impact on our biology?