Quotes from Gilles Deleuze

When someone asks 'what's the use of philosophy?' the reply must be aggressive, since the question tries to be ironic and caustic. Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church, who have other concerns. It serves no established power.

The speculative object and the practical object of philosophy as Naturalism, science and pleasure, coincide on this point: it is always a matter of denouncing the illusion, the false infinite, the infinity of religion and all of the theologico-erotic-oneiric myths in which it is expressed.

If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.

A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.

If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.

Bring something incomprehensible into the world!

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

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?

It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.

The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?

The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.

Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater!

Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.

To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one's self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.

You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.

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

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

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.

An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking.

A leftist government doesn't exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.

There's no democratic state that's not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery.

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.

In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.

So it's not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don't stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.