Georges Bataille - Life Quotes

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Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.

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

Georges Bataille