Georges Bataille > Quotes

“I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.”
― Georges Bataille, Violent Silence: Celebrating Georges Bataille

“The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.”
― Georges Bataille

“A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.”
― Georges Bataille

“I don't want your love unless you know i am repulsive,and love me even as you know it.”
― Georges Bataille

“Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.”
― Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

“Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaining it.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror”
― Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye

“In what will survive me
I am in harmony
with my annihilation.”
― Georges Bataille

“Incredible nervous state, trepidation beyond words: to be this much in love is to be sick (and I love to be sick).”
― Georges Bataille, The Impossible: A Story of Rats followed by Dianus and by The Oresteia

“To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have gelded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savor the "pleasures of the flesh" only on condition that they be insipid.
But as of then, no doubt existed for me: I did not care for what is known as "pleasures of the flesh" because they really are insipid; I cared only for what is classified as "dirty." On the other hand, I was not even satisfied with the usual debauchery, because the only thing it dirties is debauchery itself, while, in some way or other, anything sublime and perfectly pure is left intact by it. My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.”
― Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye

“We have in fact only two certainties in this world - that we are not everything and that we will die.”
― Georges Bataille

“The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.”
― Georges Bataille

“I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acceptation of a way of life wherein each moment has meaning only in relation to another or others that will follow it.”
― Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

“A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others.

In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches.

Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms.”
― Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus

“Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.”
― Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

“Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.”
― Georges Bataille

“The owl flies, in the moonlight, over a field where the wounded cry out.

Like the owl, I fly in the night over my own misfortune.”
― Georges Bataille, The Impossible: A Story of Rats followed by Dianus and by The Oresteia

“Above all human existence requires stability, the permanence of things. The result is an ambivalence with respect to all great and violent expenditure of strength; such an expenditure, whether in nature or in man, represents the strongest possible threat. The feelings of admiration and of ecstasy induced by them thus mean that we are concerned to admire them from afar. The sun corresponds to that prudent concern. It is all radiance gigantic loss of heat and light, flame, explosion; but remote from men, who can enjoy in safety and quiet the fruits of this cataclysm. To earth belongs the solidity which sustains houses of stone and the steps of men (at least on its surface, for buried within the depths of the earth is the incandescence of lava).”
― Georges Bataille, Van Gogh As Prometheus

“We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world.”
― George Bataille

“Indeed, the direction of the future is only there in order to elude us.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commrnce from that point on.”
― Georges Bataille, Guilty

“It is clear that the world is purely parodic, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.”
― Georges Bataille

“Eroticism is the brink of the abyss. I'm leaning out over deranged horror (at this point my eyes roll back in my head). The abyss is the foundation of the possible. We're brought to the edge of the same abyss by uncontrolled laughter or ecstasy. From this comes a "questioning" of everything possible. This is the stage of rupture, of letting go of things, of looking forward to death.”
― Georges Bataille, Guilty

“Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding away inside us; we always want to be sure of the uselessness or the ruinousness of our extravagance.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“We did not lack modesty—on the contrary—but something urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible.”
― Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye

“You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.”
― Georges Bataille, My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man

“The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life, that life's intimacy does not reveal it's dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out.”
― Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion

“The warrior's nobility is like a prostitute's smile, the truth of which is self-interest.”
― Georges Bataille, Inner Experience

“I enjoyed the innocence of unhappiness and of helplessness; could I blame myself for a sin which attracted me, which flooded me with pleasure precisely to the extent it brought me to despair?”
― Georges Bataille, My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man

“Poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism — to the blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to eternity, it leads us to death, and through death to continuity. Poetry is eternity; the sun matched with the sea.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality