Georges Bataille Short Quotes

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Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
[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
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
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
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
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
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
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