Top 90 Gilles Deleuze Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.”

— Gilles Deleuze

52. “It is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center draws its power, hence their extreme maliciousness, and vanity.”

— Gilles Deleuze

53. “The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say... What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing... the thing that might be worth saying.”

— Gilles Deleuze

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

— Gilles Deleuze

55. “Every time someone puts an objection to me, I want to say: ‘OK, OK, let’s go on to something else.’ Objections have never contributed anything.”

— Gilles Deleuze

56. “The theory of thought is like painting: it needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction. This is the aim of a theory of thought without image.”

— Gilles Deleuze

57. “Identity and resemblance would then be no more than inevitable illusions – in other words, concepts of reflection which would account for our inveterate habit of thinking difference on the basis of the categories of representation.”

— Gilles Deleuze

58. “Drunkenness as a triumphant irruption of the plant in us.”

— Gilles Deleuze

59. “Photography, if there is photography, is already snapped, already shot, in the very interior of things and for all points of space.”

— Gilles Deleuze

60. “Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church, who have other concerns. It serves no established power. The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy that saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy. It is useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into something shameful.”

— Gilles Deleuze

61. “The various forms of education or ‘normalization’ imposed upon an individual consist in making him or her change points of subjectification, always moving towards a higher, nobler one in closer conformity with the supposed ideal. Then from the point of subjectification issues a subject of enunciation, as a function of a mental reality determined by that point. Then from the subject of enunciation issues a subject of the statement, in other words, a subject bound to statements in conformity with a dominant reality.”

— Gilles Deleuze

62. “A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same Ocean for all the drops, a single clamour of Being for all beings: on condition that each being, each drop and each voice has reached the state of excess – in other words, the difference which displaces and disguises them and, in turning upon its mobile cusp, causes them to return.”

— Gilles Deleuze

63. “I have no admiration for culture. I have no reserve knowledge, no provisional knowledge. And everything that I learn, I learn for a particular task, and once it’s done, I immediately forget it, so that if ten years later, I have to get involved with something close to or directly within the same subject, I would have to start again from zero, with some few exceptions.”

— Gilles Deleuze

64. “The masters according to Nietzsche are the untimely, those who create, who destroy in order to create, not to preserve. Nietzsche says that under the huge earth-shattering events are tiny silent events, which he likens to the creation of new worlds: there once again you see the presence of the poetic under the historical.”

— Gilles Deleuze

65. “A minority may be bigger than a majority.”

— Gilles Deleuze

66. “Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.”

— Gilles Deleuze

67. “What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.”

— Gilles Deleuze

68. “Language is not made to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience newspapers, news, proceed by redundancy, in that they tell us what we ‘must’ think, retain, expect, etc. language is neither informational nor communicational. It is not the communication of information but something quite different: the transmission of order-words, either from one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the statement.”

— Gilles Deleuze

69. “We must believe in the body, but as in the germ of life, the seed which splits open the paving stones, which has been preserved and lives on in the holy shroud or the mummy’s bandages, and which bears witness to life, in this world as it is. We need an ethic or a faith, which makes fools laugh; it is not a need to believe in something else, but a need to believe in this world, of which fools are a part.”

— Gilles Deleuze

70. “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.”

— Gilles Deleuze

71. “It’s a strange business, speaking for yourself, in your own name, because it doesn’t at all come with seeing yourself as an ego or a person or a subject. Individuals find a real name for themselves, rather, only through the harshest exercise in depersonalization, by opening themselves up to the multiplicities everywhere within them, to the intensities running through them.”

— Gilles Deleuze

72. “A great writer is always like a foreigner in the language which he expresses himself, even if this is his native tongue. At the limit, he draws his strength from a mute and unknown minority that belongs only to him. He is a foreigner in his own language: he does not mix another language with his own language, he carves out a nonpreexistent foreign language within his own language. He makes the language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur.”

— Gilles Deleuze

73. “Destiny never consists in step-by-step deterministic relations between presents which succeed one another according to the order of a represented time. Rather, it implies between successive presents non-localisable connections, actions at a distance, systems of replay, resonance and echoes, objective chances, signs, signals, and roles which transcend spatial locations and temporal successions.”

— Gilles Deleuze

74. “The gray butterfly understands so well the event “to be hidden” that, by remaining in the same place, plastered to the trunk of a tree, it covers the whole distance separating it from the “to invigorate” of the black butterfly; it also causes the other event to resonate as individual, within its own individuality as an event, and as a fortuitous case.”

— Gilles Deleuze

75. “Every animal is fundamentally a band, a pack.”

— Gilles Deleuze

76. “The modulating principle of “salary according to merit” has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.”

— Gilles Deleuze

77. “Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. What is encountered may be Socrates, a temple or a demon. It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed. In this sense it is opposed to recognition.”

— Gilles Deleuze

78. “Spinoza or Nietzsche are philosophers whose critical and destructive powers are without equal, but this power always springs from affirmation, from joy, from a cult of affirmation and joy, from the exigency of life against those who would mutilate and mortify life. For me, that is philosophy itself.”

— Gilles Deleuze

79. “A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds.”

— Gilles Deleuze

80. “Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given, that by which the given is given as diverse. Difference is not the phenomena but the noumena closest to the phenomena.”

— Gilles Deleuze

81. “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.”

— Gilles Deleuze

82. “The administration of a great organized molar security has as its correlate a whole micro-management of petty fears, a permanent molecular insecurity, to the point that the motto of domestic policymakers might be: a macropolitics of society by and for the micropolitics of insecurity.”

— Gilles Deleuze

83. “Nietzsche then speaks of the “eternal joy of becoming... that joy which includes even joy in destroying”, “The affirmation of passing away and destroying, which is the decisive feature of a Dionysian philosophy.”

— Gilles Deleuze

84. “Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy.”

— Gilles Deleuze

85. “It’s impossible not to laugh when codes are jammed up.”

— Gilles Deleuze

86. “But what is it that happens precisely when we encounter someone we love? Do we encounter somebody, or is it animals that come to inhabit you, ideas that invade you, movements that move you, sounds that traverse you? And can these things be parted?”

— Gilles Deleuze

87. “We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world.”

— Gilles Deleuze

88. “History progresses not by negation and the negation of negation, but by deciding problems and affirming differences. It is no less bloody and cruel as a result. Only the shadows of history live by negation.”

— Gilles Deleuze

89. “One does not go back to reconquer the myth, one encounters it anew, when time quakes at its foundations under the empire of extreme danger.”

— Gilles Deleuze

90. “The old monetary mole is the animal of the spaces of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network.”

— Gilles Deleuze

91. “When Spinoza says that we do not even know what a body can do, this is practically a war cry. He adds that we speak of consciousness, mind, soul, of the power of the soul over the body; we chatter away about these things, but do not even know what bodies can do. Moral chattering replaces true philosophy.”

— Gilles Deleuze

92. “The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say.”

— Gilles Deleuze

93. “There is always another breath in my breath, another thought in my thought, another possession in what I possess, a thousand things and a thousand beings implicated in my complications: every true thought is an aggression.”

— Gilles Deleuze

94. “The organism is a diversion of life, whereas abstract line is life itself.”

— Gilles Deleuze

95. “Plato will have to invent a transcendence that can be exercised and situated within the field of immanence itself. This is the meaning of the theory of Ideas.”

— Gilles Deleuze

96. “Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeated by money – and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles on noncommunication, circuit breakers, so that we can elude control.”

— Gilles Deleuze

97. “What we should in fact do, is stop allowing philosophers to reflect ‘on’ things. The philosopher creates, he doesn’t reflect.”

— Gilles Deleuze

98. “It’s a strange business, speaking for yourself, because it doesn’t at all come with seeing yourself as an ego or a person or a subject.”

— Gilles Deleuze