Georges Bataille Quotes & Sayings

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

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

The truth is paradoxical to the extent of being exactly contrary to the usual perception. — Georges Bataille

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

Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror — Georges Bataille

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

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

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

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 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

Incredible nervous state, trepidation beyond words: to be this much in love is to be sick (and I love to be sick). — 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

Not every woman is a prostitute, but prostitution is the natural apotheosis of the feminine attitude. — 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

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

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

Thought does not ennoble us and neither does it differentiate humans from other animals. — Georges Bataille

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

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

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

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

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

You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp. — Georges Bataille

From incoherent barkings of desire, man can advance to distinct speech now that, labelling the object with a name, he is able to make an implicit connection between the material it is made of and the work required to get it from the old state to the new in which it is ready for use. Thenceforth language firmly anchors the object in the stream of time. — Georges Bataille

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

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

Intimacy cannot be expressed discursively. The swelling to the bursting point, the malice that breaks out with clenched teeth and weeps; the sinking feeling that doesn't know where it comes from or what it's about; the fear that sings its head off in the dark; the white-eyed pallor, the sweet sadness, the rage and the vomiting...are so many evasions. What is intimate, in the strong sense, is what has the passion of an absence of individuality, the imperceptible sonority of a river, the empty limpidity of the sky — 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

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

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

Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude. — Georges Bataille

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

And, writing to you, I know that I cannot speak to you, but there is no way of preventing myself from speaking. I am going abroad, as far away as possible, but everywhere I go I shall be in the same delirium, the same whether far from you or near, for the pleasure in me depends on no one, it emanates from me alone, from the imbalance in me which perpetually frays my nerves. You can see it for yourself, you aren't the cause of it, I can do without you and I want you at a distance from me, but if you are involved, if it be a question of you, then I want to be in this delirium, I want you to behold it, I want it to destroy you. — Georges Bataille

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

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

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

It has always been possible to say "The moral emptiness of today's world is appalling." — Georges Bataille

The road to the kingdom of childhood, governed by ingenuousness and innocence, is thus regained in the horror of atonement. The purity of love is regained in its intimate truth which, as I said, is that of death. Death and the instant of divine intoxication merge when they both oppose those intentions of Good which are based on rational calculation. And death indicates the instant which, in so far as it is instantaneous, renounces the calculated quest for survival. The instant of the new individual being depended on the death of other beings. Had they not died there would have been no room for new ones. Reproduction and death condition the immortal renewal of life; they condition the instant which is always new. That is why we can only have a tragic view of the enchantment of life, but that is also why tragedy is the symbol of enchantment. — 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

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

We did not lack modesty - on the contrary - but something urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible. — Georges Bataille

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

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

As for the sphere of thought, it is horror. Yes, it is horror itself. — Georges Bataille

I teach the art of turning anguish into delight. — Georges Bataille

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

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

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

The certainty of incoherence in reading, the inevitable crumbling of the soundest constructions, is the deep truth of books. Since appearance constitutes a limit, what truly exists is a dissolution into common opacity rather than a development of lucid thinking. The apparent unchangingness of books is deceptive: each book is also the sum of the misunderstandings it occasions. — Georges Bataille

If literature stays away from evil, it rapidly becomes boring. — Georges Bataille

The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility. — Georges Bataille

[F]or academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. — Georges Bataille

Eroticism is the brink of the abyss. I'm leaning out over deranged horror (at this point my eyes roll back in my head). The abyss is the foundation of the possible. We're brought to the edge of the same abyss by uncontrolled laughter or ecstasy. From this comes a "questioning" of everything possible. This is the stage of rupture, of letting go of things, of looking forward to death. — 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

My stupidity gave its blessing to succouring nature, on her knees before God.
What I am (my drunken laughter and happiness) is nonetheless at stake, handed over to chance, thrown out into the night, chased away like a dog.
The wind of truth responded like a slap to piety's extended cheek.
The heart is human to the extent that it rebels (this means: to be a man is 'not to bow down before the law').
A poet doesn't justify - he doesn't accept - nature completely. True poetry is outside laws. But poetry ultimately accepts poetry.
When to accept poetry changes it into its opposite (it becomes the mediator of an acceptance!) I hold back the leap in which I would exceed the universe, I justify the given world, I content myself with it — Georges Bataille

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

One day or another, it is true, dust, supposing it persists, will probably begin to gain the upper hand over domestics, invading the immense ruins of abandoned buildings, deserted dockyards; and, at that distant epoch, nothing will remain to ward off night-terrors, for lack of which we have become such great book-keepers... — Georges Bataille

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

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

If poetry introduces the strange, it does so by means of the familiar. The poetic is the familiar dissolving into the strange, and ourselves wit it. It never dispossesses us entirely, for the words, the images (once dissolved) are charged with emotions already experienced, attached to objects which link them to the known. — 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

The true luxury and the real potlatch of our times falls to the poverty-stricken, that is, to the individual who lies down and scoffs. A genuine luxury requires the complete contempt for riches, the somber indifference of the individual who refuses to work and makes his life on the one hand an infinitely ruined splendor, and on the other, a silent insult to the laborious lie of the rich. — Georges Bataille

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

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

Eroticism cannot be entirely revealed without poetry. — Georges Bataille

To put it more precisely, since language is by definition the expression of civilised man, violence is silent. Civilisation and language grew as though violence was something outside. But silence cannot do away with things that language cannot state. Violence is as stubbornly there just as much as death, and if language cheats to conceal universal annihilation, the placid work of time, language alone suffers, language is the poorer, not time and not violence. — Georges Bataille

How cruel my suffering is, - no one is more talkative than I am! — Georges Bataille

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

These moments of intoxication, when we defy everything, when, the anchor raised, we go merrily toward the abyss, with no more thought for the inevitable fall than for the limits given in the beginning, are the only ones when we are completely free of the ground (of laws) ...
Nothing exists that doesn't have this senseless sense - common to flames, dreams, uncontrollable laughter - in those moments when consumption accelerates, beyond the desire to endure. Even utter senselessness ultimately is always this sense made of the negation of all the others. (Isn't this sense basically that of each particular being who, as such, is the senselessness of all the others, but only if he doesn't care a damn about enduring - and thought (philosophy) is at the limit of this conflagration, like a candle blown out at the limit of a flame.) — Georges Bataille

Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion. — Georges Bataille

What seems to be unspeakable weakness can sometimes be just distaste for the generally accepted morality. — 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

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

Eroticism is the approval of life unto death. — 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

Naturally, love's the most distant possibility. — Georges Bataille

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

In what will survive me I am in harmony with my annihilation. — Georges Bataille

These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature. Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil - an acute form of Evil - which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a 'hypermorality.'
Literature is communication. Communication requires loyalty. A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.
- Literature and Evil — Georges Bataille

Above all human existence requires stability, the permanence of things. The result is an ambivalence with respect to all great and violent expenditure of strength; such an expenditure, whether in nature or in man, represents the strongest possible threat. The feelings of admiration and of ecstasy induced by them thus mean that we are concerned to admire them from afar. The sun corresponds to that prudent concern. It is all radiance gigantic loss of heat and light, flame, explosion; but remote from men, who can enjoy in safety and quiet the fruits of this cataclysm. To earth belongs the solidity which sustains houses of stone and the steps of men (at least on its surface, for buried within the depths of the earth is the incandescence of lava). — Georges Bataille

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

A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism. — Georges Bataille

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

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

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

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

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

Man always becomes other. Man is the animal who continually differs from himself. — 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

Indeed, the direction of the future is only there in order to elude us. — Georges Bataille

The fact that the site of narrative is an ideal topos disqualifies neither pornography nor science fiction from being literature. Such — Georges Bataille

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

TO WHOM LIFE IS AN EXPERIENCE TO BE CARRIED AS FAR AS POSSIBLE ...
I have not meant to express my thought but to help you clarify what you yourself think ...
You are not any more different from me than your right leg is from your left, but what joins us is THE SLEEP OF REASON - WHICH PRODUCES MONSTERS.
- Theory of Religion — Georges Bataille

To remain virile in the light demands the audacity of a mad ignorance: letting oneself catch fire, screaming with joy, expecting death - because of an unknown, unknowable presence; becoming love and blind light oneself, attaining the perfect incomprehension of the sun. — 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

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

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