Georges Bataille Quotes

61 Sourced Quotes

Eroticism differs from animal sexuality in that human sexuality is limited by taboos and the domain of eroticism is that of the transgression of these taboos. Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo. It presupposes man in conflict with himself.

Georges Bataille
When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene. It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery.

Georges Bataille
It is human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress it, it is the agitation of all menthat alone determines revolutionary mental forms, in opposition to bourgeois mental forms.

Georges Bataille
It is through an intimate cessation of all intellectual operations that the mind is laid bare. If nor, discourse maintains it in its little complacency. … The difference between inner experience and philosophy resides principally in this: that in experience, … what counts is no longer the statement of wind, but the wind.

Georges Bataille
I remain in intolerable non-knowledge, which has no other way out than ecstasy itself.

Georges Bataille
Life has always taken place in a tumult without apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and its reality in ecstasy and in ecstatic love.

Georges Bataille
The difficulty—that contestation must be done in the name of an authority—is resolved this: I contest in the name of contestation what experience itself is.

Georges Bataille
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
In the helter-skelter of this book, I didn't develop my views as theory. In fact, I even believe that efforts of that kind are tainted with ponderousness. Nietzsche wrote with his blood, and criticizing, or, better, experiencing him means pouring out one's lifeblood. … It was only with my life that I wrote the Nietzsche book that I had planned.

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

Georges Bataille
To choose evil is to choose freedom— freedom, emancipation from all restraint.

Georges Bataille
Inner experience … is not easily accessible and, viewed from the outside by intelligence, it would even be necessary to see in it a sum of distinct operations, some intellectual, others aesthetic, yet others moral. … It is only from within, lived to the point of terror, that it appears to unify that which discursive thought must separate.

Georges Bataille
We have in fact only two certainties in this world—that we are not everything and that we will die. To be conscious of not being everything, as one is of being mortal, is nothing. But if we are without a narcotic, an unbreathable void reveals itself. I wanted to be everything, so that falling into this void, I might summon my courage and say to myself: I am ashamed of having wanted to be everything, for I see now that it was to sleep. From that moment begins a singular experience. The mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy coexist.

Georges Bataille
Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one's equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the labors of the mind which incessantly contradict what they have just established.

Georges Bataille
Concern for this or that limited good can sometimes lead to the summit... But this occurs in a roundabout way. Moral ends … are distinct from any excesses they occasion. States of glory and moments of sacredness surpass results intentionally sought.

Georges Bataille
What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners? – A violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?

Georges Bataille
By inner experience I understand that which one usually calls mystical experience: the states of ecstasy, of rapture, at least of meditated emotion. But I am thinking less of confessional experience, to which one has had to adhere up to now, that of an experience laid bare, free of ties, even of an origin, of any confession whatever. This is why I don't like the word mystical.

Georges Bataille
We reach ecstasy by a contestation of knowledge. Were I to stop at ecstasy and grasp it, in the end I would define it.

Georges Bataille
Human entirety can only be what it is when giving up the addiction to others' ends.

Georges Bataille
But a sort of rupture-in anguish-leaves us at the limit of tears: in such a case we lose ourselves, we forget ourselves and communicate with an elusive beyond.

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
Entirety exists within me as exuberance … in empty longing … in … the desire to burn with desire.

Georges Bataille
The preceding criticism … justifies the following definition of the entire human: human existence as the life of unmotivated celebration, celebration in all meaning of the word: laughter, dancing, orgy, the rejection of subordination, and sacrifice that scornfully puts aside any consideration of ends, property, and morality.

Georges Bataille
Nothing radically changes when instead of human satisfaction, we think of the satisfaction of some heavenly being! God's person displaces the problem and does not abolish it.

Georges Bataille
The total person is first disclosed … in areas of life that are lived frivolously.

Georges Bataille
[Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return] is what makes moments caught up in the immanence of return suddenly appear as ends. In every other system, don't forget, these moments are viewed as means: Every moral system proclaims that each moment of life ought to be motivated. Return unmotivates the moment and frees life of ends.

Georges Bataille
The advance of intelligence diminished, as a secondary consequence, the possible in a realm which appeared foreign to intelligence: that of inner experience.
To say diminished is even to say too little. The development of intelligence leads to a drying up of life which, in return, has narrowed intelligence. It is only if I state this principle: inner experience itself is authority that I emerge from this impotence.

Georges Bataille
Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us.

Georges Bataille
It is the positive practice of freedom, not the negative struggle against particular oppression, that has lifted me above a mutilated existence.

Georges Bataille