Georges Bataille Quotes

61 Sourced Quotes

Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit; to become delightful, happiness must be tainted with poison.

Georges Bataille
I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.

Georges Bataille
Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.

Georges Bataille
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
Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things.

Georges Bataille
Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognized and stable individuality.

Georges Bataille
The analysis of laughter had opened to me points of contact between the fundamentals of a communal and disciplined emotional knowledge and those of discursive knowledge.

Georges Bataille
Anyone wanting slyly to avoid suffering identifies with the entirety of the universe, judges each thing as if he were it. In the same way, he imagines, at bottom, that he will never die. We receive these hazy illusions like a narcotic necessary to bear life. But what happens to us when, disintoxicated, we learn what we are? Lost among babblers in a night in which we can only hate the appearance of light which comes from babbling. The self-acknowledged suffering of the disintoxicated is the subject of this book.

Georges Bataille
Only literature could reveal the process of breaking the law - without which the law would have no end - independently of the necessity to create order.

Georges Bataille
Philosophy … finds itself to be no longer anything but the heir to a fabulous mystical theology, but missing a God and wiping the slate clean.

Georges Bataille
An intention that rejects what has no meaning in fact is a rejection of the entirety of being.

Georges Bataille
If I give up the viewpoint of action, my perfect nakedness is revealed to me.

Georges Bataille
What causes [fragmentation] if not a need to act that specializes us and limits us to the horizon of a particular activity? Even if it turns out to be for the general interest (which generally isn't true), the activity that subordinates each of our aspects to a specific result suppresses our being as an entirety. Whoever acts substitutes a particular end for what he or she is, as a total being.

Georges Bataille
My true church is a whorehouse – the only one that gives me true satisfaction.

Georges Bataille
[Zarathustra] never abandoned the watchword of not having any end, not serving a cause, because, as he knew, causes pluck off the wings we fly with.

Georges Bataille
Existence as entirety remains beyond any one meaning—and it is the conscious presence of humanness in the world inasmuch as this is nonmeaning, having nothing to do other than be what it is, no longer able to go beyond itself or give itself some kind of meaning through action.

Georges Bataille
Humanity-attached-to-the-task-of-changing-the-world, which is only a single and fragmentary aspect of humanity, will itself be changed in humanity-as-entirety.

Georges Bataille
Each of us is incomplete compared to someone else - an animal's incomplete compared to a person... and a person compared to God, who is complete only to be imaginary.

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

Georges Bataille
Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.

Georges Bataille
In previous conditions, extreme states came under the jurisdiction of the arts... People substituted writing (fiction) for what was once spiritual life, poetry (chaotic words) for actual ecstasies. Art constitutes a minor free zone outside action, paying for its freedom by giving up the real world. A heavy price!

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

Georges Bataille
Experience is, in fever and anguish, the putting into question (to the test) of that which a man knows of being. Should he in this fever have any apprehension whatsoever, he cannot say: I have seen God, the absolute, or the depths of the universe ; he can only say that which I have seen eludes understanding —and God, the absolute, the depths of the universe are nothing if they are not categories of the understanding.

If I said decisively, I have seen God, that which I see would change. Instead of the inconceivable unknown—wildly free before me, leaving me wild and free before it—there would be a dead object and the thing of the theologian, to which the unknown would be subjugated.

Georges Bataille
Life is whole only when it isn't subordinate to a specific object that exceeds it. In this way, the essence of entirety is freedom.

Georges Bataille
We can't rely on anything. Except ourselves. Ludicrous responsibility devolves on us, overwhelms us. In every regard, right up the present, people always have relied on each other—or God.

Georges Bataille
By the care she lavishes on her toilet, by the concern she has for her beauty set off by her adornment, a woman regards herself as an object always trying to attract men's attention.

Georges Bataille
Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death

Georges Bataille
If I want to realize totality in my consciousness, I have to relate myself to an immense, ludicrous, and painful convulsion of all of humanity.

Georges Bataille
It seems impossible, in fact, to judge the eye using any word other than seductive, since nothing is more attractive in the bodies of animals and men. But extreme seductiveness is probably at the boundary of horror.

Georges Bataille