Georges Bataille > Quotes

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

“I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction. ”
― 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 profaining it.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“Incredible nervous state, trepidation beyond words: to be this much in love is to be sick (and I love to be sick).”
― Georges Bataille, The Impossible

“Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.”
― Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

“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, Theory of Religion

“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, Story of the Eye

“The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.”
― Georges Bataille

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

“To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have welded 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 the condition that they may be insipid.”
― Georges Bataille

“In what will survive me
I am in harmony
with my annihilation.”
― 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, Van Gogh As Prometheus

“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, The Impossible

“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, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

“Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.”
― Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

“We did not lack modesty—on the contrary—but something urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible.”
― Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye

“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 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 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, Literature and Evil

“Indeed, the direction of the future is only there in order to elude us.”
― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“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, Literature and Evil

“Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things.”
― 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, The Bataille Reader

“Chaos can be one means of arriving at a definable possibility, but if we look back at the works of Blake's youth chaos must be understood as something impossible, as a poetic violence and not as a calculated order. 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, Literature and Evil

“The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility.”
― 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

“Human life, distinct from juridical existence, existing as it does on a
globe isolated in celestial space, from night to day and from one country
to another—human life cannot in any way be limited to the closed
systems assigned to it by reasonable conceptions. The immense travail
of recklessness, discharge, and upheaval that constitutes life could be
expressed by stating that life starts with the deficit of these systems;
at least what it allows in the way of order and reserve has meaning
only from the moment when the ordered and reserved forces liberate
and lose themselves for ends that cannot be subordinated to any thing
one can account for. It is only by such insubordination—even if it is
impoverished—that the human race ceases to be isolated in the unconditional
splendor of material things.”
― 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

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

“...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, My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man

“You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.”
― Georges Bataille, My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man

“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, My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man

“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

“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

“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

“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, The Accursed Share 1: Consumption

“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, Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux or the Birth of Art

“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, My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man

“Los hombres se desconocen el el bien y se aman en el mal. El bien es la hipocresia. El mal es el amor. La inocencia es el amor del pecado.”
― 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

“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