Georges Bataille

The total person is first disclosed ... in areas of life that are lived frivolously.

— Georges Bataille

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

— Georges Bataille

Human entirety can only be what it is when giving up the addiction to others' ends.

— Georges Bataille

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

— Georges Bataille

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

— Georges Bataille

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

— Georges Bataille

The owl flies, in the moonlight, over a field where the wounded cry out. Like the owl, I fly in the night…

— Georges Bataille

The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life, that life's intimacy does not…

— Georges Bataille

Only literature could reveal the process of breaking the law - without which the law would have no end - independently of…

— Georges Bataille

A judgment about life has no meaning except the truth of the one who speaks last, and the mind is at ease…

— Georges Bataille

“The chaos of the mind cannot constitute a reply to the providence of the universe. All it can be is an awakening…

— Georges Bataille

Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one's equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the…

— Georges Bataille

The great monuments are raised up like dams, pitting the logic of majesty and authority against all the shady elements: it is…

— 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…

— Georges Bataille

Life has always taken place in a tumult without apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and its reality in ecstasy…

— Georges Bataille

“The certainty of incoherence in reading, the inevitable crumbling of the soundest constructions, is the deep truth of books. Since appearance constitutes…

— 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…

— Georges Bataille

“One day or another, it is true, dust, supposing it persists, will probably begin to gain the upper hand over domestics, invading…

— Georges Bataille

“...being aware that the sacred quality hidden in the experience of eroticism is something impossible for language to reach (this is also…

— Georges Bataille

The preceding criticism justifies the following definition of the entire human: human existence as the life of "unmotivated" celebration, celebration in all…

— Georges Bataille

Inner experience ... is not easily accessible and, viewed from the outside by intelligence, it would even be necessary to see in…

— 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…

— Georges Bataille

Eroticism differs from animal sexuality in that human sexuality is limited by taboos and the domain of eroticism is that of the…

— Georges Bataille

Existence as entirety remains beyond any one meaning and it is the conscious presence of humanness in the world inasmuch as this…

— Georges Bataille

“That sand into which we bury ourselves in order not to see, is formed of words…and it is true that words, their…

— Georges Bataille

“Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of…

— Georges Bataille

It seems impossible, in fact, to judge the eye using any word other than seductive, since nothing is more attractive in the…

— Georges Bataille

The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the…

— Georges Bataille

When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene. It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a…

— Georges Bataille

It is human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress…

— Georges Bataille

“If ultimately there was a tantalizing rectitude about her, she was none the less cunning: her exceeding gentleness, howbeit mitigated sometimes by…

— Georges Bataille

But a sort of rupture-in anguish-leaves us at the limit of tears: in such a case we lose ourselves, we forget ourselves…

— Georges Bataille

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent…

— Georges Bataille

What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners? – A violation bordering on death,…

— Georges Bataille

“the word silence is still a sound, to speak is in itself to imagine knowing; and to no longer know, it would…

— Georges Bataille

Philosophy finds itself to be no longer anything but the heir to a fabulous mystical theology, but missing a God and wiping…

— Georges Bataille

By the care she lavishes on her toilet, by the concern she has for her beauty set off by her adornment, a…

— Georges Bataille