The 95 best phrases of Gilles Deleuze
The world of philosophy would not be complete without the works of Gilles Deleuze, who contributed very interesting concepts on ‘the similar and the similar’, that is, of those things repeated that can in a certain way, overshadow something original. It was also a great writer and critic of literature, film, arts, politics and philosophyThe latter being his field of development until his death.
- We recommend you read: "The 70 best famous phrases of Herbert Marcuse"
Famous quotes by Gilles Deleuze
To remember his legacy and reflect on life, we have brought a compilation with the best phrases of Gilles Deleuze that you cannot miss.
1. Drinking is a question of quantity.
A reference to the addiction of the drink.
2. Meaning is never a principle or origin, but a product. It does not have to be discovered, restored, or replaced, it must be produced using new machinery.
The meaning comes from actions.
3. Anarchy and unity are one and the same thing, not the unity of the One, but a stranger unity that only demands itself from the many.
Two elements that, according to the philosopher, complement each other.
4. A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a court of reason. Or it can be thrown out the window.
Each one forms the concepts that suit them.
5. Philosophy has always dealt with concepts, and to do philosophy is to try to create or invent concepts.
Philosophy is the mother of all sciences.
6. We are taught that companies have a soul, which is without a doubt the scariest news in the world.
Talking about the humanization of companies.
7. Art is what resists: it resists death, servitude, infamy, shame.
Art always lives.
8. A creator is a being who works for pleasure.
Every creator embodies his passion.
9. Sadness does not make you smart.
Sadness clouds all judgment.
10. It is always written to give life, to release life wherever it is imprisoned, to draw lines of flight.
Writing brings a new world to life.
11. The sales service has become the center or ‘soul’ of the company.
Speaking of the principle of consumerism.
12. Ears are lacking to listen to what one does not have access to from experience.
Even if it is explained to us, we will never understand something that we have not experienced.
13. Many young people strangely demand to be motivated, they ask for more courses, more permanent training: from them It is necessary to discover what they are used for, as their elders discovered, not without effort, the purpose of the disciplines.
It is useless to accumulate knowledge but it will be used in practice.
14. When you have a sad affection, it is that a body acts on his, a soul acts on his in such conditions and under a relationship that does not agree with yours.
Referring to the impact and cause of sadness.
15. The characteristic of the capitalist machine is to make the debt infinite.
The insatiable hunger of capitalism.
16. In sadness we are lost. That is why the powers have a need for the subjects to be sad.
There are rulers who use sadness as a form of control.
17. A philosopher is not only someone who invents notions, he also invents ways of perceiving.
The work of a philosopher.
18. It can be said that the majority is nobody.
Most should not always be right.
19. Writing is not imposing a form of expression on a lived matter.
Writing is offering an opportunity for the imagination to emerge.
20. The rings of a snake are even more complicated than the holes of a molehill.
Not all things are so obvious.
21. 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.
His vision of the origin of sadness.
22. Posing the problem is not simply discovering, it is inventing.
For a problem, there must be a solution.
23. Anguish has never been a game of culture, intelligence or vivacity.
The anguish is personal.
24. When a minority create models it is because they want to become a majority, and it is undoubtedly inevitable for their survival or salvation.
Minorities must be heard.
25. Marketing is now the instrument of social control, and it forms the shameless race of our masters.
Marketing as a strategy for consumerism.
26. Literature is next to the formless, the unfinished... Writing is a matter with the future, always unfinished, always in progress, and that overflows any livable or lived matter.
Reflections on literature.
27. Do not carry life under the weight of superior values, even heroic ones, but create new values that are those of life, that make life light or affirmative.
The values that must be preserved are those that make us human.
28. When a body meets a different body or an idea with a different one, it happens or that their relationships are compose forming a more powerful whole, or that one of these decomposes the other and destroys the cohesion of their parts.
When two people are together, there is an inevitable reaction.
29. Every sensation is a question, even when only silence answers.
Silence is sometimes the best answer.
30. We are in a generalized crisis of all places of confinement: prison, hospital, factory, school, family.
Even the family can be a cage.
31. The secret of the eternal return is that it does not express in any way an order that opposes chaos and subdues it.
Fragment of one of his postulates.
32. The man is no longer the man locked up, but the man in debt.
We went from fighting for our freedom to fighting for economic stability.
33. The traitor is very different from the cheater: the cheater seeks to take refuge in established properties, conquer a territory, and even establish a new order. The cheater has a long future, but he has not the slightest future.
Differences between two malicious acts.
34. 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 judges according to his beliefs.
35. Minorities and majorities are not distinguished by number.
Needs belong to everyone.
36. The real big problems are only raised when they are solved.
There cannot be a problem without anticipating a solution.
37. The family is an 'interior' in crisis like all interiors, schoolchildren, professionals, etc.
Families can be the source of thousands of problems.
38. It is true that philosophy is inseparable from a certain anger against its time, but also that it guarantees us serenity.
Philosophy is rebellion, but it is also a response.
39. It is true that capitalism has kept as constant the extreme misery of three-quarters of humanity: too poor for debt, too numerous for the confinement: control will not only have to deal with the dissipation of borders, but also with the explosions of slums and ghettos.
Capitalism only protects its own.
40. Each one of us has his universe line to discover, but he does not discover it except by tracing it, tracing his rough line.
Each one travels his own path. Not someone else's.
41. Man invests himself in the name of heroic values, in the name of human values.
Values are fundamental to people.
42. A book is a small cog in a much more complex external machinery.
Books are part of our training.
43. In controlling companies, on the contrary, the essential thing is no longer a signature or a number, but a cipher: cipher is a password, while disciplinary societies are regulated by slogans.
The numbers are indicators of success or failure for governments.
44. It is easy to look for correspondences between types of society and types of machines, not because machines are determinative, but because they express the social formations that have originated them and that they use.
Speaking of the importance of machines for society.
45. There is no place for fear, nor for hope. Searching new weapons is the only option left.
A reflection on prioritizing weapons to solve conflicts.
46. Philosophy is not a Power. Religions, States, capitalism, science, law, opinion or television are powers, but not philosophy.
Defending the role of philosophy.
47. Those who read Nietzsche without laughing and without laughing much, without laughing often, and sometimes out loud, it is as if they did not read him.
Sometimes we don't have to take things so seriously.
48. Desire is revolutionary because it always wants more connections and more assemblages.
Desire drives us to innovate.
49. It is known that in Nietzsche, the theory of the superior man is a critique that aims to denounce the mystification more deepest or most dangerous of humanism: the superior man tries to bring humanity to perfection, to culmination.
Deleuze shows us a bit of Nietzsche's work.
50. But as sentient beings, we never learn anything.
There are lessons that we don't like to hear.
51. Philosophy has never been restricted to philosophy teachers.
Philosophy cannot be controlled because it is always in motion.
52. To wish is to build an assemblage, to build a set, the set of a skirt, of a ray of sunshine ...
Desire leads us to build.
53. There is no universal State precisely because there is a universal market of which the States are centers or Stock Exchanges.
Deleuze reflects on the governing role of the economy.
54. When someone asks what philosophy is for, the answer must be aggressive since the question is considered ironic and scathing.
Not everyone understands the why of philosophy.
55. A philosopher is one who becomes a philosopher, that is, one who is interested in those creations so peculiar to the order of concepts.
It's all about creation within philosophy.
56. In capitalism there is only one universal thing, the market.
The market is the main basis of capitalism.
57. The discovery concerns what already exists today or virtually: it was, therefore, sure that sooner or later it had to come.
Every discovery has its place.
58. The secret of the eternal return is that it does not express in any way an order that opposes chaos and subdues it.
The eternal return is one of Deleuze's most famous concepts.
59. Philosophy serves neither the State nor the Church, which have other concerns. It does not serve any established power.
Philosophy serves the creation need of humans.
60. The space traveled is past, movement is present, it is the act of traveling.
The present is never static.
61. They plant trees in our heads: that of life, that of knowledge, etc. Everybody claims roots. The power of submission is always arborescent.
A metaphor to explain the needs that are imposed on us, although they are not always satisfied.
62. Invention gives being to what it was not and could never have arrived.
Each discovery grants a new ability.
63. Literature, like writing, consists of inventing a people that is missing.
Literature fills in gaps.
64. Philosophy serves to sadden.
Sometimes you must feel sad to reflect.
65. The space traveled is divisible, and even infinitely divisible, while the movement is indivisible, or it is not divided without changing, with each division, its nature.
Exposing one of his notions.
66. When you drink, what he wants to get to is the last glass.
The feeling when you drink.
67. The proper names designate forces, events, movements and motives, winds, typhoons, diseases, places and moments before people.
Names have power.
68. Who are the television customers? They are no longer the listeners.
Television has become a tool for speculation.
69. A philosophy that does not make anyone sad or upset is not a philosophy. It serves to detest stupidity, it makes stupidity a shameful thing. It only has this use: to denounce the baseness of thought in all its forms.
Philosophy must be tough.
70. That which the majority defines is a model to which one must conform: for example, middle European, adult, male, city dweller. While a minority has no model, it is a becoming, a process.
Majority versus minorities.
71. At first I was more interested in law than in politics.
His first professional inclination.
72. I try to explain that things, people, are made up of very different lines, and that they always know what line of themselves they are on, or where to pass the line they are on tracing; in a word, that in people there is a whole geography, with hard, flexible and vanishing lines.
All people are different.
73. Drinking is literally doing everything possible to access the last glass. That is what matters.
It is a cycle without end.
74. The verbs in the infinitive designate becoming and events that go beyond fashions and times.
About the verbs we use in life.
75. The television customers are the advertisers; they are the real advertisers. Listeners get what advertisers want ...
Advertisers are the ones who control the audience.
76. Is there any discipline, outside of philosophy, that proposes the critique of all mystifications, whatever their origin and purpose?
There is no other discipline like philosophy.
77. The explosion, the splendor of the event is the meaning.
Events awaken consciousness.
78. Emotion is creative, first of all, because it expresses the entire creation; secondly, because it creates the work in which it is expressed; and finally, because it communicates a bit of that creativity to viewers or listeners.
Every creation has an emotion behind it.
79. Only the act of resistance resists death, be it in the form of a work of art or in the form of a human struggle.
Art is resistance, as you already mentioned.
80. We experience joy when a body meets ours and enters into composition with it, and sadness when, on the contrary, an organ or an idea threatens our own coherence.
A way of seeing joy and sadness.
81. An open system is one in which the concepts refer to circumstances and no longer to essences.
About open systems.
82. I was interested in movements, collective creations, and not so much in representations.
Deleuze was interested in collective power.
83. Make free men, that is, men who do not confuse the aims of culture with the benefit of the State, morality or religion. Fight resentment, bad conscience, which take the place of thought. Overcome the negative and its false prestige. Who, except for philosophy, is interested in all this?
Philosophy leads to reflection.
84. The event is not what happens (accident); the expressed cigar that beckons us and awaits us is in what happens.
Events are consequences.
85. True freedom resides in a power of decision, of constitution of the problems themselves.
Freedom is being able to decide.
86. And what relationship is there between the struggle of men and the work of art? The closest relationship and for me the most mysterious.
All art has a relationship with its creator.
87. Control companies act through machines of a third type, computer machines and computers whose passive risk is interference and whose active risk is piracy and virus inoculation.
A reflection on how societies control us.
88. Philosophy as criticism tells us the most positive thing about itself: a demystification company.
Philosophy works to bring the truth.
89. I do not consider myself as an intellectual at all, I do not consider myself someone cultured, for a simple reason, and that is that when I see someone cultured, I am stunned.
The way you perceive yourself.
90. The truth is that, in philosophy and even in other fields, it is a question of finding the problem and, therefore, of raising it even more than of solving it.
Philosophy offers several ways of looking at a problem.
91. It is not just a technological evolution, it is a profound mutation of capitalism.
Technology as a tool of capitalism.
92. A minority may be more numerous than a majority.
Sometimes minorities have a stronger voice.
93. Someone cultured does not stop drawing attention: it is an astonishing knowledge about everything.
We can all recognize someone cultured.
94. But, on the one hand, the concepts are not given or made in advance, they do not pre-exist: you have to invent, you have to create the concepts, and it requires as much inventiveness or as much creativity as in science or science. Arts.
Concepts must be built.
95. Utopia is not a good concept: what there is is rather a fable common to the people and art.
Utopia is a fantasy that never comes true.
