Bataille Inner Experience Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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