Georges Bataille Quotes

50 quotes in 649 categories

• 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;…
• 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…
• The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility.
• I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.
• Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things.
• 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.
• 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.…
• 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…
• Naturally, love's the most distant possibility.
• 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…
• Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners? – A violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?
• My true church is a whorehouse – the only one that gives me true satisfaction.

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