Bataille Famous Quotes & Sayings
100 Bataille Famous Sayings, Quotes and Quotation.
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
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
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
Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things.— Georges Bataille
The warrior's nobility is like a prostitute's smile, the truth of which is self-interest.— Georges Bataille
Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognized and stable individuality.— Georges Bataille
What seems to be unspeakable weakness can sometimes be just distaste for the generally accepted morality.— Georges Bataille
I don't want your love unless you know i am repulsive,and love me even as you know it.— 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
Human entirety can only be what it is when giving up the addiction to others' ends.— Georges Bataille
Thought does not ennoble us and neither does it differentiate humans from other animals.— Georges Bataille
the word silence is still a sound, to speak is in itself to imagine knowing; and to no longer know, it would be necessary to no longer speak— Georges Bataille
The owl flies, in the moonlight, over a field where the wounded cry out.— Georges Bataille
Like the owl, I fly in the night over my own misfortune.
The fact that the site of narrative is an ideal topos disqualifies neither pornography nor science fiction from being literature. Such— 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
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
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.'— Georges Bataille
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
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
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
Naturally, love's the most distant possibility.— 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
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
Eroticism cannot be entirely revealed without poetry.— 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
By the care she lavishes on her toilet, by the concern she has for her beauty set off by her adornment, a woman regards herself as an object always trying to attract men's attention.— 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
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
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
How cruel my suffering is, - no one is more talkative than I am!— 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
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
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 sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.— Georges Bataille
If I give up the viewpoint of action, my perfect nakedness is revealed to me.— Georges Bataille
Philosophy ... finds itself to be no longer anything but the heir to a fabulous mystical theology, but missing a God and wiping the slate clean.— Georges Bataille
We reach ecstasy by a contestation of knowledge. Were I to stop at ecstasy and grasp it, in the end I would define it.— 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
The circumstances of my life are paralyzing.— 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
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
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
Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.— Georges Bataille
As for the sphere of thought, it is horror. Yes, it is horror itself.— Georges Bataille
Literature ... is the rediscovery of childhood.— Georges Bataille
The analysis of laughter had opened to me points of contact between the fundamentals of a communal and disciplined emotional knowledge and those of discursive knowledge.— Georges Bataille
Entirety exists within me as exuberance ... in empty longing ... in ... the desire to burn with desire.— Georges Bataille
You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.— 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
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
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) ...— Georges Bataille
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.)
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
Human life, distinct from juridical existence, existing as it does on a— Georges Bataille
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.
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
To choose evil is to choose freedom, emancipation from all restraint.— 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
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
I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.— 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
Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.— Georges Bataille
I remain in intolerable non-knowledge, which has no other way out than ecstasy itself.— Georges Bataille
Humanity-attached-to-the-task-of-changing-the-world, which is only a single and fragmentary aspect of humanity, will itself be changed in humanity-as-entirety.— 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
Man always becomes other. Man is the animal who continually differs from himself.— 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
Indeed, the direction of the future is only there in order to elude us.— Georges Bataille
An intention that rejects what has no meaning in fact is a rejection of the entirety of being.— Georges Bataille
[F]or academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.— Georges Bataille
![Bataille Sayings By Georges Bataille: [F]or academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/bataille-sayings-by-georges-bataille-856274.jpg "Bataille Sayings By Georges Bataille: [F]or academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of")
The fascination of sleep, which pits the lure of the void against the obstinacy of an impotent will, is an obstacle that life has perhaps never surmounted.— 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
A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.— Georges Bataille
Not every woman is a prostitute, but prostitution is the natural apotheosis of the feminine attitude.— 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
When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene. It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery.— 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
Eroticism is the approval of life unto death.— Georges Bataille
A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others.— Georges Bataille
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.
Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us.— Georges Bataille
Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commrnce from that point on.— Georges Bataille
Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.— 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
The emotional element which gives an obsessive value to communal existence is death.— 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
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
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
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.— Georges Bataille
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.
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
The difficulty that contestation must be done in the name of an authority is resolved this: I contest in the name of contestation what experience itself is.— 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
[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
![Bataille Sayings By Georges Bataille: [Zarathustra] never abandoned the watchword of not having any end, not serving a cause, because,](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/bataille-sayings-by-georges-bataille-1331359.jpg "Bataille Sayings By Georges Bataille: [Zarathustra] never abandoned the watchword of not having any end, not serving a cause, because,")
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
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
The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility.— 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
I teach the art of turning anguish into delight.— Georges Bataille
Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.— Georges Bataille
In what will survive me I am in harmony with my annihilation.— 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
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
I'm also a book nerd so aside from my life and my opinions, you could say my lyrics are inspired in some sense by the writings of Guy Debord, John Berryman, Georges Bataille, T.S. Eliot, Albert Camus, Bukowski, Artaud, Derrick Jensen and bunch of other people.— Dominic Owen Mallary
