Georges Bataille Quotes

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

A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror

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

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.

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

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

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?

How cruel my suffering is,—no one is more talkative than I am!

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.

Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.

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

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.

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.

You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

The circumstances of my life are paralyzing.

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.

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

Literature ... is the rediscovery of childhood.

Eroticism cannot be entirely revealed without poetry.

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

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.

Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.

Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things.

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

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.

If I give up the viewpoint of action, my perfect nakedness is revealed to me.

Eroticism is the approval of life unto death.

[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.

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

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

I remain in intolerable non-knowledge, which has no other way out than ecstasy itself.

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.