Gilles Deleuze - Collected Quotes

"To interpret is to determine the force which gives to a thing. To evaluate is to determine the will to power which gives value to a thing. We can no more abstract values from the standpoint from which they draw value than we can abstract meaning from the standpoint from which it draws its signification. The will to power as genealogical element is that from which senses derive their significance and values their values." (Gilles Deleuze,"Nietzsche and Philosophy", 1962)

"A thought that is born within thought, an act of thought engendered within its own genealogy, neither given through innateness, nor presupposed in reminiscence, is a thought without image." (Gilles Deleuze, "Difference and Repetition", 1968)

"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, "Difference and Repetition", 1968)

"This is why thought as power which has not always existed, is born from an outside [duration] more distant than an external world, and, as power which does not yet exist, confronts an inside, an un thinkable or unthought, deeper than any internal world. […] Thought outside itself and this unthought within thought." (Gilles Deleuze, "Cinema 2: The Time-Image", 1980) 

"What is in the present is what the image ‘represents‘, but not the image itself which, in cinema as in painting, is never to be confused with what it represents. The image itself is the system of the relationships between its elements, that is, a set of relationships from which the variable present only flows. […] What is specific in the image, as soon as it is creative, is to make perceptible, to make visible, relationships of time which cannot be seen in the represented object and do not allow them - selves to be reduced to the present." (Gilles Deleuze, "Cinema 2: The Time-Image", 1980)

"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, "Cinema 1: The Movement Image", 1983)

"The thing and the perception of the thing are one amid the same thing, one and the same image, but related in one or other of two systems of reference. The thing is the image as it is in itself, as it is related to all the other images to whose action it completely submits and on which it reacts immediately. But the perception of the thing is the same image related to another special image which frames it, and which only retains a partial action from it, and only reacts to it mediately." (Gilles Deleuze, "Cinema 1: The Movement Image", 1983)

"An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking." (Gilles Deleuze,"Dialogues II", 1987) 

"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, What is Philosophy?", 1991)