Gilles Deleuze

The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy which saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy. It is useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into something shameful. Its only use is the exposure of all forms of baseness of thought.

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.

In many ways the Palestinians are the new Indians, the Indians of Israel.

I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist.

An exhausted man is much more than a weary man. Does he exhaust the possible because he is himself exhausted, or is he exhausted because he has exhausted the possible? He exhausts himself by exhausting the possible, and inversely.

The body of the woman is the overwhelming triumph of flesh. The woman is a concrete universal; she is a world, not an externalized world, but under the world, the warm interiority of the world, a compressed internalized world.

Academics' lives are seldom interesting.

What we should in fact do, is stop allowing philosophers to reflect 'on' things. The philosopher creates, he doesn't reflect.

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.

Substance must itself be said of the modes and only of the modes.

Intensities are implicated multiplicities, 'implexes,' made up of relations between asymmetrical elements.

The virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual.

Israel has never hidden its goal, creating a vacuum in the Palestinian territory.

The eye binds light, is itself a bound light. This binding is a reproductive synthesis, a Habitus.