Top 90 Gilles Deleuze Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.”

— Gilles Deleuze

2. “Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency.”

— Gilles Deleuze

3. “Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive, nor communicative. They are creative, that’s all.”

— Gilles Deleuze

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

— Gilles Deleuze

5. “There’s no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”

— Gilles Deleuze

6. “The aim of critique is not the ends of man or of reason but in the end the Overman, the overcome, overtaken man. The point of critique is not justification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility.”

— Gilles Deleuze

7. “Underneath all reason lies delirium and drift.”

— Gilles Deleuze

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

— Gilles Deleuze

9. “A creator is someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities.”

— Gilles Deleuze

10. “Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”

— Gilles Deleuze

11. “Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?”

— Gilles Deleuze

12. “The shame of being a man – is there any better reason to write?”

— Gilles Deleuze

13. “It’s not easy to see things from the middle, rather than looking down on them from above or up at them from below, or from left to right or right to left: try it, you’ll see that everything changes.”

— Gilles Deleuze

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

— Gilles Deleuze

15. “A leftist government doesn’t exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.”

— Gilles Deleuze

16. “Intuition is neither a feeling, an inspiration nor a disorderly sympathy but a fully developed method.”

— Gilles Deleuze

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

— Gilles Deleuze

18. “Psychoanalysts are bent on producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture. It is Oedipus who produces man in this fashion and who gives a structure to the false movement of infinite progression and regression.”

— Gilles Deleuze

19. “To write is to struggle and resist; to write is to become; to write is to draw a map: ‘I am a cartographer’.”

— Gilles Deleuze

20. “The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor; all that consists is Real.”

— Gilles Deleuze

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

— Gilles Deleuze

22. “In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.”

— Gilles Deleuze

23. “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.”

— Gilles Deleuze

24. “The percept is the landscape before man, in the absence of man.”

— Gilles Deleuze

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

— Gilles Deleuze

26. “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.”

— Gilles Deleuze

27. “Reading something from beginning to end. That is reading with love.”

— Gilles Deleuze

Featured in: Reading Quotes

28. “Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.”

— Gilles Deleuze

29. “Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object.”

— Gilles Deleuze

30. “Can you harness the power of drugs without them taking over, without turning into a dazed zombie?”

— Gilles Deleuze

31. “My eye, my brain, are images, parts of my body. How could my brain contain images since it is one image among others?”

— Gilles Deleuze

32. “According to Beckett’s or Kafka’s law, there is immobility beyond movement: beyond standing up, there is sitting down, and beyond sitting down, lying down, beyond which one finally dissipates.”

— Gilles Deleuze

33. “A tyrant institutionalises stupidity, but he is the first servant of his own system and the first to be installed within it.”

— Gilles Deleuze

34. “Nietzsche’s break with Schopenhauer rests on precisely this point; it is a matter of knowing whether the will is unitary or multiple.”

— Gilles Deleuze

35. “Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.”

— Gilles Deleuze

36. “The philosopher creates, he doesn’t reflect.”

— Gilles Deleuze

37. “It is already hard enough to understand what someone is saying. Discussion is just an exercise in narcissism where everyone takes turns showing off. Very quickly, you no longer have any idea what is being discussed.”

— Gilles Deleuze

38. “I believe strongly that philosophy has nothing to do with specialists.”

— Gilles Deleuze

39. “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.”

— Gilles Deleuze

40. “Philosophy is not in a state of external reflection on other domains, but in a state of active and internal alliance with them, and it is neither more abstract nor more difficult.”

— Gilles Deleuze

41. “Only thought is capable of inventing the fiction of a State that is universal by right, of elevation the State to the level of de jure universality.”

— Gilles Deleuze

42. “Things never pass where you think, nor along the paths you think.”

— Gilles Deleuze

43. “As for being responsible or irresponsible, we don’t recognize those notions, they’re for policemen and courtroom psychiatrists.”

— Gilles Deleuze

44. “Far from being a psychological trait, the spirit of revenge is the principle on which our whole psychology depends.”

— Gilles Deleuze

45. “External images act on me, transmit movement to me, and I return movement: how could images be in my consciousness since I am myself image, that is, movement?”

— Gilles Deleuze

46. “Is it not first through the voice that one becomes animal?”

— Gilles Deleuze

47. “The child is a metaphysical being.”

— Gilles Deleuze

48. “What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages or combinations: how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces.”

— Gilles Deleuze

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

— Gilles Deleuze

50. “The instinct of revenge is the force which constitutes the essence of what we call psychology, history, metaphysics and morality. The spirit of revenge is the genealogical element of our thought, the transcendental principle of our way of thinking.”

— Gilles Deleuze