Top 100 Georges Bataille Quotes
#1. The art teacher's scarlet book was called Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. 'As the title suggests,' Mr Dunwoody saw the book'd caught my attention, 'it's about the history of opticians. What are you about?
David Mitchell
#2. I'm also a book nerd so aside from my life and my opinions, you could say my lyrics are inspired in some sense by the writings of Guy Debord, John Berryman, Georges Bataille, T.S. Eliot, Albert Camus, Bukowski, Artaud, Derrick Jensen and bunch of other people.
Dominic Owen Mallary
#3. 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
#4. If I give up the viewpoint of action, my perfect nakedness is revealed to me.
Georges Bataille
#5. The fact is, that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted that mind ... From the very first he set before the consciousness things which it could not tolerate.
Georges Bataille
#6. 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
#7. ... I felt as if I were living only in order to be more aware that I was dead.
Georges Bataille
#8. Not every woman is a prostitute, but prostitution is the natural apotheosis of the feminine attitude.
Georges Bataille
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. We have in fact only two certainties in this world - that we are not everything and that we will die.
Georges Bataille
#12. In the violence of overcoming, in the disorder of my laughter and my sobbing, in the excess of raptures that shatter me, I seize on the similarity between a horror and a voluptuousness that goes beyond me, between an ultimate pain and an unbearable joy!
Georges Bataille
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. [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
#16. Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death
Georges Bataille
#17. To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.
Georges Bataille
#18. 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
#19. If ultimately there was a tantalizing rectitude about her, she was none the less cunning: her exceeding gentleness, howbeit mitigated sometimes by the disturbing oppressiveness that foretells a storm in the air, left me utterly blind.
Georges Bataille
#20. 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
#21. Under the present conditions, everything conspires to obscure the basic movement that tends to restore wealth to its function, to gift-giving, to squandering without reciprocation.
Georges Bataille
#22. 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
#23. Being aware that the sacred quality hidden in the experience of eroticism is something impossible for language to reach (this is also due to the impossibility of experiencing of re-experiencing anything through language), Bataille still expresses it in words. (Mishima on Bataille)
Georges Bataille
#24. Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.
Georges Bataille
#25. 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
#26. Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.
Georges Bataille
#27. 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
#28. I began to willfully indulge in dreams that, with the help of a bottle of wine, became completely mad and were close to being loathsome.
Georges Bataille
#29. I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.
Georges Bataille
#30. 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
#31. That sand into which we bury ourselves in order not to see, is formed of words ... and it is true that words, their labyrinths, the exhausting immensity of their "possibles", in short their treachery, have something of quicksand about them.
Georges Bataille
#32. Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things.
Georges Bataille
#34. 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
#35. The emotional element which gives an obsessive value to communal existence is death.
Georges Bataille
#37. Man always becomes other. Man is the animal who continually differs from himself.
Georges Bataille
#38. 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
#39. How cruel my suffering is, - no one is more talkative than I am!
Georges Bataille
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Thought does not ennoble us and neither does it differentiate humans from other animals.
Georges Bataille
#44. 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.
Georges Bataille
#45. That discourse one might call the poetry of transgression is also knowledge. He who transgresses not only breaks a rule. He goes somewhere that the others are not; and he knows something the others don't know.
Georges Bataille
#46. An intention that rejects what has no meaning in fact is a rejection of the entirety of being.
Georges Bataille
#47. What seems to be unspeakable weakness can sometimes be just distaste for the generally accepted morality.
Georges Bataille
#48. Entirety exists within me as exuberance ... in empty longing ... in ... the desire to burn with desire.
Georges Bataille
#49. A judgment about life has no meaning except the truth of the one who speaks last, and the mind is at ease only at the moment when everyone is shouting at once and no one can hear a thing.
Georges Bataille
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.
Georges Bataille
#53. The great monuments are raised up like dams, pitting the logic of majesty and authority against all the shady elements: it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak and impose silence on the multitudes.
Georges Bataille
#54. The fascination of sleep, which pits the lure of the void against the obstinacy of an impotent will, is an obstacle that life has perhaps never surmounted.
Georges Bataille
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. It has always been possible to say "The moral emptiness of today's world is appalling."
Georges Bataille
#58. If literature stays away from evil, it rapidly becomes boring.
Georges Bataille
#59. Incredible nervous state, trepidation beyond words: to be this much in love is to be sick (and I love to be sick).
Georges Bataille
#60. Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.
Georges Bataille
#61. 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
#62. In what will survive me I am in harmony with my annihilation.
Georges Bataille
#64. As for the sphere of thought, it is horror. Yes, it is horror itself.
Georges Bataille
#65. I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night.
Georges Bataille
#66. 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
#67. We pedaled rapidly, without laughing or speaking, peculiarly satisfied with our mutual presence, akin to one another in the common isolation of lewdness, weariness, and absurdity.
Georges Bataille
#68. 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
#69. 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
#71. To choose evil is to choose freedom, emancipation from all restraint.
Georges Bataille
#73. Human entirety can only be what it is when giving up the addiction to others' ends.
Georges Bataille
#74. 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
#75. The total person is first disclosed ... in areas of life that are lived frivolously.
Georges Bataille
#76. 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
#77. Literature is communication. Communication requires loyalty. A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.
Georges Bataille
#78. We did not lack modesty - on the contrary - but something urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible.
Georges Bataille
#79. The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.
Georges Bataille
#80. The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility.
Georges Bataille
#82. 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
#84. There is, in every man, an animal ... imprisoned, like a galley slave, and there is a gate, and if we open the gate, the animal will rush out, like the slave finding his way to escape.
Georges Bataille
#85. Realism gives me the impression of a mistake. Violence alone escapes the feeling of poverty of those realistic experiences. Only death and desire have the force that oppresses, that takes one's breath away. Only the extremism of desire and death enable one to attain the truth.
Georges Bataille
#87. 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
#88. the word silence is still a sound, to speak is in itself to imagine knowing; and to no longer know, it would be necessary to no longer speak
Georges Bataille
#89. The truth is paradoxical to the extent of being exactly contrary to the usual perception.
Georges Bataille
#91. The fact that the site of narrative is an ideal topos disqualifies neither pornography nor science fiction from being literature. Such
Georges Bataille
#92. 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
#94. I don't want your love unless you know i am repulsive,and love me even as you know it.
Georges Bataille
#95. I have in my mind an obscenity so great that I could vomit the most dreadful words and it wouldn't be enough!
Georges Bataille
#97. The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.
Georges Bataille
#98. The warrior's nobility is like a prostitute's smile, the truth of which is self-interest.
Georges Bataille
#99. I remain in intolerable non-knowledge, which has no other way out than ecstasy itself.
Georges Bataille
#100. The chaos of the mind cannot constitute a reply to the providence of the universe. All it can be is an awakening in the night, where all that can be heard is anguished poetry let loose.
Georges Bataille
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
