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Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things
Gilles Deleuze
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Interpretation

What this quote means

True courage involves recognizing and escaping false comforts rather than settling for a deceptive sense of security.

In this quote, Deleuze emphasizes the importance of courage in acknowledging when one is encased in comfortable deceptions. He argues that rather than clinging to false refuges—be it in values, morals, or beliefs that offer a misleading sense of security—one should be brave enough to confront uncertainty or discomfort, thus genuinely engaging with the complexities of life.

Themes

CourageHypocrisyTruthValuesDeception

In practice

Example use cases

This quote could be used in a speech about personal growth and the importance of confronting one’s false beliefs.

More from Gilles Deleuze

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
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Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.
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Intuition is neither a feeling, an inspiration nor a disorderly sympathy but a fully developed method.
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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.
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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.
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Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive, nor communicative. They are creative, that's all.
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Quote by Gilles Deleuze | QuoteProject