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To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one's self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.
Gilles Deleuze
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Interpretation

What this quote means

The quote explores the concept of self-dissolution in order to genuinely understand and love others.

In this quote, Deleuze reflects on the idea that to truly love and connect with others, one must sometimes dismantle their own identity and ego. By becoming 'imperceptible' and 'nobody', individuals can strip away their personal biases and limitations, enabling a deeper, more authentic connection with others, symbolized by the metaphor of 'gray on gray'. It suggests that true interpersonal relationships require vulnerability and the willingness to transcend one’s self-conception.

Themes

LoveIdentityConnectionSelflessnessPhilosophy

In practice

Example use cases

This quote could be used in a discussion on love and relationships during a seminar on self-awareness.

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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