Georges Bataille
I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.Collection: Truth
Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.Collection: Happiness
Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.Collection: Death
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.Collection: Dreams
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.
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.
Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things.
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.
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 love.
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.
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.
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.
A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.Collection: Kissing
I don't want your love unless you know i am repulsive,and love me even as you know it.Collection: And Love
The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.Collection: Needs
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.Collection: Sex
Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horrorCollection: Horror
To choose evil is to choose freedom, emancipation from all restraint.Collection: Evil
Not every woman is a prostitute, but prostitution is the natural apotheosis of the feminine attitude.Collection: Attitude
Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit; to become delightful, happiness must be tainted with poison.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: World
In what will survive me I am in harmony with my annihilation.Collection: Harmony
Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.Collection: Stronger
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.Collection: Night
I teach the art of turning anguish into delight.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Humanity
You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.Collection: Desire
The warrior's nobility is like a prostitute's smile, the truth of which is self-interest.Collection: Warrior
We have in fact only two certainties in this world - that we are not everything and that we will die.Collection: Two
The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.Collection: Space
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.Collection: Blood
My true church is a whorehouse – the only one that gives me true satisfaction.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Kids
If I give up the viewpoint of action, my perfect nakedness is revealed to me.Collection: Giving Up
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.Collection: Self
It is human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress it, it is the agitation of all menthat alone determines revolutionary mental forms, in opposition to bourgeois mental forms.Collection: Police
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.Collection: Mind
Humanity-attached-to-the-task-of-changing-the-world, which is only a single and fragmentary aspect of humanity, will itself be changed in humanity-as-entirety.Collection: Humanity
Human entirety can only be what it is when giving up the addiction to others' ends.Collection: Giving Up
Nothing radically changes when instead of human satisfaction, we think of the satisfaction of some heavenly being! God's person displaces the problem and does not abolish it.Collection: Thinking
What causes [fragmentation] if not a need to act that specializes us and limits us to the horizon of a particular activity? Even if it turns out to be for the general interest (which generally isn't true), the activity that subordinates each of our aspects to a specific result suppresses our being as an entirety. Whoever acts substitutes a particular end for what he or she is, as a total being.Collection: Needs
The analysis of laughter had opened to me points of contact between the fundamentals of a communal and disciplined emotional knowledge and those of discursive knowledge.Collection: Laughter
An intention that rejects what has no meaning in fact is a rejection of the entirety of being.Collection: Rejection
It is through an "intimate cessation of all intellectual operations" that the mind is laid bare. If nor, discourse maintains it in its little complacency. ... The difference between inner experience and philosophy resides principally in this: that in experience, ... what counts is no longer the statement of wind, but the wind.Collection: Philosophy
Inner experience ... is not easily accessible and, viewed from the outside by intelligence, it would even be necessary to see in it a sum of distinct operations, some intellectual, others aesthetic, yet others moral. ... It is only from within, lived to the point of terror, that it appears to unify that which discursive thought must separate.Collection: Intellectual
Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.Collection: Communication
In the helter-skelter of this book, I didn't develop my views as theory. In fact, I even believe that efforts of that kind are tainted with ponderousness. Nietzsche wrote "with his blood," and criticizing, or, better, experiencing him means pouring out one's lifeblood. It was only with my life that I wrote the Nietzsche book that I had planned.Collection: Believe