Georges Bataille quotes - page 2

The warrior's nobility is like a prostitute's smile, the truth of which is self-interest. (Georges Bataille)
In previous conditions, extreme states came under the jurisdiction of the arts... People substituted writing (fiction) for what was once spiritual life, poetry (chaotic words) for actual ecstasies. Art constitutes a minor free zone outside action, paying for its freedom by giving up the real world. A heavy price! View quote
Georges Bataille
I don't want your love unless you know i am repulsive, and love me even as you know it. View quote
Georges Bataille
In what will survive me I am in harmony with my annihilation. View quote
Georges Bataille
The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth. View quote
Georges Bataille
A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism. View quote
Georges Bataille
Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror. View quote
Georges Bataille
Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit; to become delightful, happiness must be tainted with poison. View quote
Georges Bataille
Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion. View quote
Georges Bataille
You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp. View quote
Georges Bataille
The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space. (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. View quote
Georges Bataille
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? View quote
Georges Bataille
Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude. View quote
Georges Bataille
Incredible nervous state, trepidation beyond words: to be this much in love is to be sick (and I love to be sick). View quote
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. View quote
Georges Bataille
We did not lack modesty-on the contrary-but something urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible. View quote
Georges Bataille
Indeed, the direction of the future is only there in order to elude us. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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 and communicate with an elusive beyond. (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. View quote
Georges Bataille
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. View quote
Georges Bataille
The big toe is the most human part of the human body, in the sense that no other element of this body is as differentiated from the corresponding element of the anthropoid ape (chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan or gibbon). View quote
Georges Bataille
The advance of intelligence diminished, as a secondary consequence, the "possible” in a realm which appeared foreign to intelligence: that of inner experience. To say "diminished” is even to say too little. The development of intelligence leads to a drying up of life which, in return, has narrowed intelligence. It is only if I state this principle: "inner experience itself is authority” that I emerge from this impotence. View quote
Georges Bataille