Top 100 Georges Bataille Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.”

— Georges Bataille

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

— Georges Bataille

3. “Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaining it.”

— Georges Bataille

4. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

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

— Georges Bataille

6. “Eroticism is the approval of life unto death.”

— Georges Bataille

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

— Georges Bataille

8. “The truth is paradoxical to the extent of being exactly contrary to the usual perception.”

— Georges Bataille

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

— Georges Bataille

10. “The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.”

— Georges Bataille

11. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

12. “Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.”

— Georges Bataille

13. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

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

— Georges Bataille

15. “Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things.”

— Georges Bataille

16. “Only literature could reveal the process of breaking the law – without which the law would have no end – independently of the necessity to create order.”

— Georges Bataille

17. “The warrior’s nobility is like a prostitute’s smile, the truth of which is self-interest.”

— Georges Bataille

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

— Georges Bataille

19. “How cruel my suffering is, – no one is more talkative than I am!”

— Georges Bataille

20. “We have in fact only two certainties in this world – that we are not everything and that we will die.”

— Georges Bataille

21. “Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death.”

— Georges Bataille

22. “I imagine myself covered with blood, broken but transfigured and in agreement with the world, both as prey and as a jaw of time, which ceaselessly kills and is ceaselessly killed.”

— Georges Bataille

23. “What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners? – A violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?”

— Georges Bataille

24. “Los hombres se desconocen el el bien y se aman en el mal. El bien es la hipocresia. El mal es el amor. La inocencia es el amor del pecado.”

— Georges Bataille

25. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

26. “The great monuments are raised up like dams, pitting the logic of majesty and authority against all the shady elements: it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak and impose silence on the multitudes.”

— Georges Bataille

27. “That discourse one might call the poetry of transgression is also knowledge. He who transgresses not only breaks a rule. He goes somewhere that the others are not; and he knows something the others don’t know.”

— Georges Bataille

28. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

29. “I teach the art of turning anguish into delight.”

— Georges Bataille

30. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

31. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

32. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

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

— Georges Bataille

34. “She was crying, with wild entreaty, the way one vomits.”

— Georges Bataille

35. “In what will survive me I am in harmony with my annihilation.”

— Georges Bataille

36. “Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror.”

— Georges Bataille

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

— Georges Bataille

38. “It seems impossible, in fact, to judge the eye using any word other than seductive, since nothing is more attractive in the bodies of animals and men. But extreme seductiveness is probably at the boundary of horror.”

— Georges Bataille

39. “The taboo does not banish the transgression but, on the contrary, depends upon it, just as the transgression depends on the existence of the taboo: “The transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it.”

— Georges Bataille

40. “Naturally, love’s the most distant possibility.”

— Georges Bataille

41. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

42. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

43. “To remain virile in the light demands the audacity of a mad ignorance: letting oneself catch fire, screaming with joy, expecting death – because of an unknown, unknowable presence; becoming love and blind light oneself, attaining the perfect incomprehension of the sun.”

— Georges Bataille

44. “People always think we look for love at our lowest to distract us. I am convinced we do it because we want someone to look us in the eye, to look our ugly in the eye and still choose us. I didn’t want a distraction, I wanted you to see a mess and still find me worthy of love, to tell me that you could still love me anyway.”

— Georges Bataille

45. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

46. “Realism gives me the impression of a mistake. Violence alone escapes the feeling of poverty of those realistic experiences. Only death and desire have the force that oppresses, that takes one’s breath away. Only the extremism of desire and death enable one to attain the truth.”

— Georges Bataille

47. “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 mind which incessantly contradict what they have just established.”

— Georges Bataille

48. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

49. “An intention that rejects what has no meaning in fact is a rejection of the entirety of being.”

— Georges Bataille

50. “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?”

— Georges Bataille