Quotes Collection

“...First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must 'once in his life' withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences that, up to then, he has been accepting. Philosophy wisdom (sagesse) is the philosophizer's quite personal affair.”

“For he defined the mind by its epistemic status, as what is best known to itself by falling within the reach of the subject's incorrigibility and local omniscience.”

“We now have technologies that can do for written and visual culture something like what prices do for economic information and bureaucratic categories do for social information. Large models generate representations of a vast and ungraspable whole that do not fully capture that whole but are manipulable and reproducible at scale.”

“A genetic intelligibility is grasped by a direct insight into some single driving factor that keeps the development moving through developmental phases, such as found in developmental models of stars, plants, human intelligence, and human morality. A dialectical intelligibility is grasped by an inverse insight that there is no single driving factor that keeps the development moving.”

“We decided not to ignore the present or forget the past. We're trying to set them aside and figure out together, not how to make the past better but how to make the future better. So, we created a bubble. We aren't out of touch at all. Not from what happened to the Jews or the Arabs. Not from what is happening now. But, we're applying maximum force to try and get this process moving.”

“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”

“We head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and we return with bloodshot eyes, yet they are the eyes of the mind.”

“For me philosophy is an art of creation, much like music or painting. Philosophy creates concepts, which are neither generalities nor truths. They are more along the lines of the Singular, the Important, the New. Concepts are inseparable from affects, i.e., from the powerful effects they exert on our life, and percepts, i.e., the new ways of seeing or perceiving they provoke in us.”

“KAPPA: But will they? What if God created polyhedra so that all true universal statements about them – formulated in human language – are infinitely long? Is it not blasphemous anthropomorphism to assume that (divine) true theorems are of finite length?”

“Here we encounter an important quality in modern political discourse and in the way people commonly think about what measures are justified in response to the possibilities technologies make available. In many instances, to say that some technologies are inherently political is to say that certain widely accepted reasons of practical necessity—especially the need to maintain crucial technological systems as smoothly working.”

“...'looks' talk is not an autonomous language game - one that could be played though one played no other. It is entirely parasitic on the practice of making risky empirical reports of how things actually are.”

“What faith is to religion, labor is to political economy: humans produce gods in the same way they produce automobiles.”

“I want to re-psychologize, re-socialize, and re-embed us in the world, where we reason about that world as well as about how we interact with and reflect upon it. Can we still be recognizably philosophical while letting the subjects of 'philosophies of' shine through much more clearly and inspire new philosophies, rather than merely exporting our same old 'philosophical' disputes to these new territories?”

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

“But in reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art. The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust; the genius of Racine is the series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing. Why should we attribute to Racine the capacity to write yet another tragedy when that is precisely what he did not write? In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait.”

“Thus, different levels of rigour differ only about where they draw the line between the rigour of proof-analysis and the rigour of proof, i.e. about where criticism should stop and justification should start.”

“The development of consciousness in human beings is inseparably connected with the use of metaphor. Metaphors are not merely peripheral decorations or even useful models, they are fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition: metaphors of space, metaphors of movement, metaphors of vision.”

“Now then, imagine the importance of a language or system of expressive signs whose function was not to tell us about things but to present them to us in the act of executing themselves. Art is just such a language; this is what art does. The esthetic object is inwardness as such – it is each thing as 'I'.”

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

“This difference between the present and the actual, for Deleuze, is much more important than the difference between the present and the past. The present is what we are, and for that reason, what we are already ceasing to be; the actual is not what we are, but rather what we are becoming, what we are in the process of becoming.”

“He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness - something by no means identical with stupidity - that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is 'banal' and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace.”

“...examine these two ideas and determine how that which survives criticism in each is properly to be combined with the other...”

“Hilbert and de Broglie were as much politicians as scientists: they reestablished order.”

“Now then, imagine the importance of a language or system of expressive signs whose function was not to tell us about things but to present them to us in the act of executing themselves. Art is just such a language; this is what art does. The esthetic object is inwardness as such – it is each thing as 'I'.”

“...there are 'moral facts' in the sense of moral interpretations of situations where the moral concept in question determines what the situation is, and if the concept is withdrawn then we are not left with the same situation or the same facts. In short, if moral concepts are regarded as deep moral configurations of the world, rather than as lines drawn round separable factual areas, then there would be no facts 'behind them' for them to be erroneously defined in terms of.”

“...But what we call the meaning of a statement is its point. That's the only definition of meaning, and it comes to the same thing as a statement's novelty. You can listen to people for hours, but what's the point? . . . That's why arguments are such a strain, why there's never any point arguing. You can't just tell someone what they're saying is pointless. So you tell them it's wrong. But what someone says is never wrong, the problem isn't that some things are wrong, but that they're stupid or irrelevant.”

“Computers are a tool for conducting the network of conversations.”

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

“Thus although our sensations, as regards their quality, are only signs whose particular character depends wholly upon our own makeup, they are still not to be dismissed as a mere semblance, but they are precisely signs of something, be it something existing or happening, and — what is most important — they can form for us an image of the law of this thing which is happening.”

“For language is the armory of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests.”

“I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call Cargo Cult Science. In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he's the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land.”

“What formalism really means in Kantian ethics is an ethical purification that separates humans from the world. Ethics plays out entirely on the side of a human being's commitment to duty, to treating others as ends in themselves rather than solely as means, and in the end the world and its objects play no genuine ethical role.”

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

“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.”

“Thus I believe that philosophers should fancy themselves as dedicated students of the irregular. But inherited fashions within our subject presently reward ersatz rigor and armchair pontification without encouraging the informed attention to detail and practical application upon which proper conceptual disentanglements characteristically depend.”

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

“To say that man is a rational animal, is to say that man is a creature not of habits, but of rules. When God created Adam, he whispered in his ear, 'In all contexts of action you will recognize rules, if only the rule to grope for rules to recognize. When you cease to recognize rules, you will walk on four feet.'”

“Each thing insofar as it is in itself, endeavours to persevere in its being.”

“I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.”

“Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.”

“This is how it should be done: lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.”

“Great philosophers coin new moral concepts and communicate new moral visions and modes of understanding. [...] From here we may see that the task of moral philosophers has been to extend, as poets may extend, the limits of language, and enable it to illuminate regions which were formerly dark.”

“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.”

“It is sometimes said, either irritably or with a certain satisfaction, that philosophy makes no progress. It is certainly true, and I think this is an abiding and not a regrettable characteristic of the discipline, that philosophy has in a sense to keep trying to return to the beginning: a thing which it is not at all easy to do.”

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”

“The scenes of our life are like pictures in rough mosaic, which have no effect at close quarters, but must be looked at from a distance in order to discern their beauty. So that to obtain something we have desired is to find out that it is worthless; we are always living in expectation of better things, while, at the same time, we often repent and long for things that belong to the past. We accept the present as something that is only temporary, and regard it only as a means to accomplish our aim. So that most people will find if they look back when their life is at an end, that they have lived their lifelong ad interim, and they will be surprised to find that something they allowed to pass by unnoticed and unenjoyed was just their life — that is to say, it was the very thing in the expectation of which they lived. And so it may be said of man in general that, befooled by hope, he dances into the arms of death.”

“...gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself...”

“The virtue of a logical proof is not that it compels belief, but that it suggests doubts.”

“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.”

“He had to choose between those two. What could help him to choose? Could the Christian doctrine? No. Christian doctrine says: Act with charity, love your neighbour, deny yourself for others, choose the way which is hardest, and so forth. But which is the harder road? To whom does one owe the more brotherly love, the patriot or the mother?”

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.”

“We sometimes go on as though people can't express themselves. In fact they're always expressing themselves. The sorriest couples are those where the woman can't be preoccupied or tired without the man saying 'What's wrong? Say something…,' or the man, without the woman saying … and so on. Radio and television have spread this spirit everywhere, and we're riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity's never blind or mute. 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.”

“I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.”

“This, then, is the first feature of an immanent ethics: it replaces the notion of the transcendental subject with immanent modes of existence that are determined by their degrees of power and relations of affectivity. In his later works, Foucault suggested replacing the term 'subject' with the term 'subjectivation.'”

“I want to see more tools and fewer operated machines - we should be embracing our humanity instead of blindly improving efficiency. And that involves using our new AI technology in more deft ways than generating more content for humans to evaluate.”

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under Heaven; a time to be born and a time to die; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time of peace. Ladies and gentlemen, the time for peace has come.”

“AI is not about replacing humans, it's about augmenting human capabilities.”

“...We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate color and stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners in order to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name. So, not so perversely, objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility.”

“Bartlett et al. (2020) note 'the phenomenon of benign overfitting is one of the key mysteries uncovered by deep learning methodology: deep neural networks seem to predict well, even with a perfect fit to noisy training data.' However, benign overfitting behaviour can be reproduced with other model classes, can be understood intuitively, and is described by rigorous frameworks for characterizing generalization that have existed for decades.”

“Neither are we yet at so deplorable a loss, in the other parts of what we call Science; but that we may meet with what will content ingenuity, at this distance from perfection, though all things will not completely satisfy strict and rigid inquiry. Philosophy indeed cannot immortalize us, or free us from the inseparable attendants on this state, Ignorance and Error. But shall we malign it, because it entitles us not to an Omniscience?”

“Thus in GM, Nietzsche contrasts two forms of happiness: that of the engaged active person 'bursting with strength' (GM, p. 23), and that of the passive powerless type for whom happiness is a disengaged escape: it is 'essentially a narcotic, an anaesthetic, rest, peace, 'sabbath' relaxation of the mind ... in short [it is] something passive!'”

“What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.”

“...the abnormal will throw light on the normal, will help us to penetrate the blinding veil of ease and obviousness that hides the mechanisms of the natural successful act.”

“The goal of AI should be to create systems that can learn and think like humans, but also go beyond human capabilities.”

“Empirical knowledge is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once.”

“the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”

“Most of human and animal learning is unsupervised learning. If intelligence is a cake, the bulk of the cake is unsupervised learning.”

“Everyday conversation is not necessarily a morally neutral activity and certain ways of describing people can be corrupting and wrong. A smart set of concepts may be a most efficient instrument of corruption. It is especially characteristic of normative words, both desirable and undesirable, to belong to sets or patterns without an appreciation of which they cannot be understood.”

“The misapprehension about gender performativity is this: that gender is a choice, or that gender is a role, or that gender is a construction that one puts on, as one puts on clothes in the morning, that there is a 'one' who is prior to this gender, a one who goes to the wardrobe of gender and decides with deliberation which gender it will be today.”

“...We also don't want to theorize the world, much less act within it, in terms of Global Systems, but we do need an earthwide network of connections, including the ability partially to translate knowledges among very different-and power-differentiated - communities.”

“Hilbert, who wrote a thesis on invariants in 1885, and in 1888 gave a much simpler, but noncomputational, proof of Gordan's result on binary forms, astonished the mathematical community in 1890 by showing that any form, of any degree, in any number of variables, has a basis. Hilbert adopted a new, conceptual, approach to the subject.”

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”

“The people who hear the madman announce the death of God don't realize that this event, insofar as it is conceived merely as atheism, does nothing to overcome the governing will to nothingness. An unheroic, ethically unambitious, risk-averse civilization that laughs at supernatural ideas (for example, at their empirical unverifiability, their childlike hopes for absolute security, their licensing of religious bigotry, or the supposed logical impossibility of former articles of faith, such as God being both omnipotent and all-good) sees man as nothing more than a sophisticated animal, and takes it for granted that life and its goods can be conceived only in naturalistic terms – such a down-to-earth naturalism does not by these tokens affirm life.”

“The documentary tradition is one that gives voice to the victim. For a long time, I have wondered about the function of the victim and to what extent facing the victim is, in fact, a redeeming act. I would say it's almost a Christian situation, where you have a victim that is suffering for you [the spectator] and through his suffering he redeems the spectator and more: He says, you are human because you feel my suffering.”

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”

“The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure....you are above everything distressing.”

“Drawing on their respective studies of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (Timmermans 1999) and the administration of medical research protocols (Berg 1997), Timmermans and Berg argue that rather than evidence for a failure of procedures, or resistance on the part of those who are enrolled to carry them out, multiplicity is a requirement for a procedure or protocol's functioning as a standard.”

“Language is far more idiosyncratic than has been admitted. Reasons are not necessarily and qua reasons public. They may be reasons for a very few, and none the worse for that. 'I can't explain. You'd have to know her.' If the common object is lacking, communication may break down and the same words may occasion different results in different hearers.”

“I have argued that to treat a plan – or any other form of prescriptive representation – as a specification for a course of action shuts down precisely the space of inquiry that begs for investigation; that is, the relations between an ordering device and the contingent labors through which it is produced and made reflexively accountable to ongoing activity.”

“Re-engineering is cumulative and is what makes our cumulative cultures possible. And any engineering project must be responsive to real world constraints, thus realism. Our social, cognitive, and cultural ways of being are no less real than the rest of the natural world, and all together leave their marks.”