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

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 effect, vice turns common sense upside-down, and he who admits himself to be vicious abides by stigmatizing terms of horror. — 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 circumstances of my life are paralyzing. — Georges Bataille

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

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

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

We will live in this world, which for us has all the disquieting strangeness of the desert and of the simulacrum, with all the veracity of living phantoms, of wandering and simulating animals that capital, that the death of capital has made of us - because the desert of cities is equal to the desert of sand - the jungle of signs is equal to that of the forests - the vertigo of simulacra is equal to that of nature - only the vertiginous seduction of a dying system remains, in which work buries work, in which value buries value - leaving a virgin, sacred space without pathways, continuous as Bataille wished it, where only the wind lifts the sand, where only the wind watches over the sand. — Jean Baudrillard

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

A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism. — 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

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

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

I remember that one day, when we were in a car tooling along at top speed,we crashed into a cyclist, an apparently very young and very pretty girl. Her head was almost totally ripped off by the wheels. For a long time, we were parked a few yards beyond without getting out, fully absorbed in the sight of the corpse. The horror and despair at so much bloody flesh, nauseating in part, and in part very beautiful, was fairly equivalent to our usual impression upon seeing one another. — Georges Bataille

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

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

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

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

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

In its confounding of the logic that maintains terms like high and low, or base and sacred as polar opposites, it is this play of the contradictory that allows one to think the truth that Bataille never tired of demonstrating: that violence has historically been lodged at the heart of the sacred; that to be genuine, the very thought of the creative must simultaneously be an experience of death; and that it is impossible for any moment of true intensity to exist apart from a cruelty that is equally extreme. — Rosalind E. Krauss

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

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

[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

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

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

Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things. — 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

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

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

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

There is always some limit which the individual accepts. He identifies this limit with himself. Horror seizes him at the thought that this limit may cease to be. But we are wrong to take this limit and the individual's acceptance of it seriously. The limit is only there to be overreached. Fear and horror are not the real and final reaction; on the contrary, they are a temptation to overstep the bounds. — 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

We have in fact only two certainties in this world - that we are not everything and that we will die. — Georges Bataille

The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space. — 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

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

... I felt as if I were living only in order to be more aware that I was dead. — Georges Bataille

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

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

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

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

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

The emotional element which gives an obsessive value to communal existence is death. — 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

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

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

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

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

At man's core there is a voice that wants him never to give in to fear. But if it is true that in general man cannot give in to fear, at the very least he postpones indefinitely the moment when he will have to confront himself with the object of his fear ... when he will no longer have the assistance of reason as guaranteed by God, or when he will no longer have the assistance of God such as reason guaranteed. It is necessary to recoil, but it is necessary to leap, and perhaps one only recoils in order to leap better. — Georges Bataille

Out of despair I decided to follow this horror through. I stared down at what I was already grasping in my hand, like an ape; I wrapped myself in the dust and took off my trousers.
Interwoven joy and terror strangled me within. I strangled and I gasped from pleasure. The more those pictures terrified me, the more intense was my excitement at the sight of them. After days of accumulating alarms, tensions, suffocations, I was beyond withstanding my own ignominy. I invoked it and I blessed it. It was my inevitable fate: my joy was all the greater since, with regard to life, I had long since entrenched myself in an attitude of suffering, and now, in the throes of delight, I progressed even farther into vileness and degradation. — 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

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

To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have gelded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savor the "pleasures of the flesh" only on condition that they be insipid.
But as of then, no doubt existed for me: I did not care for what is known as "pleasures of the flesh" because they really are insipid; I cared only for what is classified as "dirty." On the other hand, I was not even satisfied with the usual debauchery, because the only thing it dirties is debauchery itself, while, in some way or other, anything sublime and perfectly pure is left intact by it. My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop. — Georges Bataille

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

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

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 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

Literature ... is the rediscovery of childhood. — 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

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

[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

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

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

What causes [fragmentation] if not a need to act that specializes us and limits us to the horizon of a particular activity? Even if it turns out to be for the general interest (which generally isn't true), the activity that subordinates each of our aspects to a specific result suppresses our being as an entirety. Whoever acts substitutes a particular end for what he or she is, as a total being. — 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

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