Erotism Quotes

“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

“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, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“Poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism — to the blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to eternity, it leads us to death, and through death to continuity. Poetry is eternity; the sun matched with the sea.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“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, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“In essence, love raises the feeling of one being for another to such a pitch that the threatened loss of the beloved or the loss of his love is felt no less keenly than the threat of death. Hence love is based on a
desire to live in anguish in the presence of an object of such high worth that the heart cannot bear to contemplate losing it. The fever of the senses is not a desire to die. Nor is love the desire to lose but the desire to live in fear of possible loss, with the beloved holding the lover on the very threshold of a swoon. At that price alone can we feel the violence of rapture before the beloved.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“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. We want to feel as remote from the world as we can. As remote as we can: that is hardly strong enough; we want a world turned upside down and inside out. The truth of eroticism is treason.
De Sade’s system is the ruinous form of eroticism. Moral isolation means that all breaks are off; it shows what spending can really mean. The man who admits the value of other people necessarily imposes limits upon himself. The respect of man to man leads to a cycle of servitude that allows only for minor moments of disorder and finally ends the respect that their attitude is based on since we are denying the sovereign moment to man in general.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“Let me stress that in this work flights of Christian religious experience and bursts of erotic impulses are seen to be part and parcel of the same movement.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“The taboo does not banish the transgression but, on the contrary, depends upon it, just as the transgression depends on the existence of the taboo: “The transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“Tutku, onu hisseden için bedenlerin arzusundan daha şiddetli bir anlam taşıyabilir. Beraberinde mutluluk umutlarını getirmesine rağmen tutkunun kargaşa ve rahatsızlığa neden olduğunu hiçbir zaman unutmamalıyız. Mutlu tutku bile o kadar şiddetli bir karışıklığa neden olur ki mutluluk haz duyulmasını sağlamadan önce çok büyük olduğu için karşıtına, yani acıya benzer. Tutkunun özü, iki varlığın süreksizliğini mükemmel sürekliliğe dönüştürmektir.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“От само себе си се разбира, че развитието на еротизма с нищо не е външно за областта на религията, но тъкмо християнството, противопоставяйки се на еротизма, е осъдило повечето религии. В някакъв смисъл християнската религия е може би най-нерелигиозната.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“The lover strips the beloved of her identity no less than the blood-stained priest his human or animal victim.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“Nous nous approchons du vide, mais ce n'est pas pour y tomber. Nous voulons nous griser de vertige et l'image de la chute y suffit.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“Anguish is what makes humankind, it seems; not anguish alone, but anguish transcended and the act of transcending it.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“If I were to be asked what we are, I should answer: 'We are the door to everything that can be, we are the expectation that no material response can satisfy, no trick with words deceive. We seek the heights. Each one of us can ignore this search if he has a mind to, but mankind as a whole aspires to these heights; they are the only definition of his nature, his only justification and significance.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“... life is nothing but instability and disequilibrium. Life is a swelling tumult continuously on the verge of explosion.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“It is the common business of sacrifice to bring life and death into harmony, to give death the upsurge of life, life the momentousness and the vertigo of death opening on to the unknown. Here life is mingled with death, but simultaneously death is a sign of life, a way into the infinite.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“Human beauty, in the union of bodies, shows the contrast between the purest aspect of mankind and the hideous animal quality of the sexual organs.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“If beauty so far removed from the animal is passionately desired, it is because to possess is to sully, to reduce to the animal level. Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“We can conceive of nothing except in terms of our own life, and beyond that, it seems to us everything is wiped out. Beyond death, in fact, begins the inconceivable which we are usually not brave enough to face. Yet the inconceivable is the expression of our own impotence. We know that death destroys nothing, leaves the totality of existence intact, but we still cannot imagine the continuity of being as a whole beyond our own death, or whatever it is that dies in us.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“In Christian sacrifice the faithful are not made responsible for desiring the sacrifice. They only contribute to the Crucifixion by their sins and their failures.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“Death was a sign of violence brought into a world which it could destroy. Although motionless, the dead man had a part in the violence which had struck him down; anything which came too near him was threatened by the destruction which had brought him low.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“İki taraf da eşit derecede haksızdır: Savunmadakiler savunulamayacak mevkileri korurken ötekiler ise saldırılamayacak mevkilere saldırırlar. Yaşam seviyelerinin aynı düzeye indirilmesine aykırı hiçbir şey yapamayız.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“Ahlaksızlığa çabucak teslim olan kötü yola düşmüş kişi kaybolmaya yazgılı bir ucubedir. Canavar olmaya müthiş kabiliyetli, deha sahibi yoldan çıkmışlar bile, eğilimlerini takip etmekle yetinseler sonları yıkım olur.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“Doğa bizi bir başımıza doğurtur, iki insan arasında en ufak bağ yoktur. Davranışlarımı düzenleyen tek kural, beni mutlu eden şeyleri tercih etmek ve bu tercihlerin başkası üzerindeki kötü etkilerini zerrece dikkate almamaktır. Başkalarının en büyük acısı benim alacağım hazdan daha önemsizdir. En zayıf hazzı olağanüstü suçları işleyerek elde etmişsem ne çıkar? Haz koltuklarımı kabartır, o benim içimdedir, oysa suç beni etkilemez, o benim dışımdadır.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“Evliliğin ilkesi karanlıkta çiftleşmektir. Eşlerin birleşmesinin kadını arzunun kendini vakfettiği nesne haline getirmediği açıktır. Bunun için kadını, tıpkı fahişe gibi, hayatın genel deviniminden çekip çıkarmak gerekir. Eş olan kadının görünümü erotizmin anlamına sahip olmaz: Bu görünüm eşlerin bir bütün olarak ortaklaşa hayatını ifade eder.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“Hayvan belki de uyuyakalmış bir insandır, insan ise kendini doğanın uykusundan koparan bir hayvan...”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“Şölende mahvoluş arayışının eriştiği şey mahvoluş ya da ölüm değil, hazdır. Boşluğa yaklaşmaktayız, ama içine düşmek için değil. Baş dönmesinden sarhoş olmak isteriz ve düşüşün imgesi buna yeter.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“Bastırmanın on kat arttırdığı bir devinimin gücü hayatı daha zengin bir dünyaya fırlattı.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“Bu iç sıkıntısı olmasa, tamamıyla lükse adanmış bir hayat bu kadar yüzsüzce olmazdı. Eğer lükse kaçmak insani bir şeyse, ürünü iç sıkıntısı olan ve iç sıkıntısının hafifletmediği bir lükse ne demeli?”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality

“Yaşayan bu dünya bir gün benim ölü ağzımda cerahatlenecek. Bu yüzden bekleyişin kaçınılmaz hayal kırıklığı aynı zamanda inkâr ettiğim, ne pahasına olursa olsun inkâr etmek zorunda olduğum korkudur.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality