quotes by Georges Bataille

"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)

"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)

"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)

"In what will survive me
I am in harmony
with my annihilation."
— 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 (The Impossible)

"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

"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 sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space."
— Georges Bataille

"The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility."
— 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 (Literature and Evil)

"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)

"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

"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)