Top 91 Quotes & Sayings by Georges Bataille

Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.

Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things.

To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.

I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.

Naturally, love's the most distant possibility.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.

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.

The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.

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.

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.

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?

The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.

Incredible nervous state, trepidation beyond words: to be this much in love is to be sick (and I love to be sick).

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.

The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.

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.

You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.

Indeed, the direction of the future is only there in order to elude us.

Eroticism is the approval of life unto death.

We reach ecstasy by a contestation of knowledge. Were I to stop at ecstasy and grasp it, in the end I would define it.

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.

Existence as entirety remains beyond any one meaning and it is the conscious presence of humanness in the world inasmuch as this is nonmeaning, having nothing to do other than be what it is, no longer able to go beyond itself or give itself some kind of meaning through action.

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.

My true church is a whorehouse – the only one that gives me true satisfaction.

We did not lack modesty—on the contrary—but something urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible.

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.

Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit; to become delightful, happiness must be tainted with poison.

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.

Not every woman is a prostitute, but prostitution is the natural apotheosis of the feminine attitude.

Eroticism cannot be entirely revealed without poetry.

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.

I don't want your love unless you know i am repulsive,and love me even as you know it.

[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.

A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others. 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.

In what will survive me I am in harmony with my annihilation.

I teach the art of turning anguish into delight.

Life is whole only when it isn't subordinate to a specific object that exceeds it. In this way, the essence of entirety is freedom.

Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.

Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one's equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the labors of the mind which incessantly contradict what they have just established.

Entirety exists within me as exuberance in empty longing in the desire to burn with desire.

Literature ... is the rediscovery of childhood.

The emotional element which gives an obsessive value to communal existence is death.

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.

A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.

Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror

To choose evil is to choose freedom, emancipation from all restraint.

The sacred demands the violation of what is normally the object of terrified respect.

At man's core there is a voice that wants him never to give in to fear. But if it is true that in general man cannot give in to fear, at the very least he postpones indefinitely the moment when he will have to confront himself with the object of his fear... when he will no longer have the assistance of reason as guaranteed by God, or when he will no longer have the assistance of God such as reason guaranteed. It is necessary to recoil, but it is necessary to leap, and perhaps one only recoils in order to leap better.

Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.

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.

Thought does not ennoble us and neither does it differentiate humans from other animals.

The warrior's nobility is like a prostitute's smile, the truth of which is self-interest.

Eroticism differs from animal sexuality in that human sexuality is limited by taboos and the domain of eroticism is that of the transgression of these taboos. Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo. It presupposes man in conflict with himself.

We have in fact only two certainties in this world - that we are not everything and that we will die.

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.