Top 100 Georges Bataille Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

52. “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

53. “There is, in every man, an animal... imprisoned, like a galley slave, and there is a gate, and if we open the gate, the animal will rush out, like the slave finding his way to escape.”

— Georges Bataille

54. “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

55. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

56. “Existence as entirety remains beyond any one meaning and it is the conscious presence of humanness in the world inasmuch as this is nonmeaning, having nothing to do other than be what it is, no longer able to go beyond itself or give itself some kind of meaning through action.”

— Georges Bataille

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

— Georges Bataille

58. “Let me stress that in this work flights of Christian religious experience and bursts of erotic impulses are seen to be part and parcel of the same movement.”

— Georges Bataille

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

— Georges Bataille

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

— Georges Bataille

61. “In the violence of overcoming, in the disorder of my laughter and my sobbing, in the excess of raptures that shatter me, I seize on the similarity between a horror and a voluptuousness that goes beyond me, between an ultimate pain and an unbearable joy!”

— Georges Bataille

62. “Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.”

— Georges Bataille

63. “We pedaled rapidly, without laughing or speaking, peculiarly satisfied with our mutual presence, akin to one another in the common isolation of lewdness, weariness, and absurdity.”

— Georges Bataille

64. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

65. “What seems to be unspeakable weakness can sometimes be just distaste for the generally accepted morality.”

— Georges Bataille

66. “Life will dissolve itself in death, rivers in the sea, and the known in the unknown.”

— Georges Bataille

67. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

68. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

69. “Poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism – to the blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to eternity, it leads us to death, and through death to continuity. Poetry is eternity; the sun matched with the sea.”

— Georges Bataille

70. “One day or another, it is true, dust, supposing it persists, will probably begin to gain the upper hand over domestics, invading the immense ruins of abandoned buildings, deserted dockyards; and, at that distant epoch, nothing will remain to ward off night-terrors, for lack of which we have become such great book-keepers...”

— Georges Bataille

71. “One can always save one’s own soul. – Lazare whispered. She uttered the sentence without moving, without even looking up. She gave me the feeling of unshakable conviction.”

— Georges Bataille

72. “The certainty of incoherence in reading, the inevitable crumbling of the soundest constructions, is the deep truth of books. Since appearance constitutes a limit, what truly exists is a dissolution into common opacity rather than a development of lucid thinking. The apparent unchangingness of books is deceptive: each book is also the sum of the misunderstandings it occasions.”

— Georges Bataille

73. “Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commrnce from that point on.”

— Georges Bataille

74. “If literature stays away from evil, it rapidly becomes boring.”

— Georges Bataille

75. “In effect, vice turns common sense upside-down, and he who admits himself to be vicious abides by stigmatizing terms of horror.”

— Georges Bataille

76. “As for the sphere of thought, it is horror. Yes, it is horror itself.”

— Georges Bataille

77. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

78. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

79. “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

80. “I began to willfully indulge in dreams that, with the help of a bottle of wine, became completely mad and were close to being loathsome.”

— Georges Bataille

81. “I have in my mind an obscenity so great that I could vomit the most dreadful words and it wouldn’t be enough!”

— Georges Bataille

82. “To put it more precisely, since language is by definition the expression of civilised man, violence is silent. Civilisation and language grew as though violence was something outside. But silence cannot do away with things that language cannot state. Violence is as stubbornly there just as much as death, and if language cheats to conceal universal annihilation, the placid work of time, language alone suffers, language is the poorer, not time and not violence.”

— Georges Bataille

83. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

84. “Our personal hallucination now developed as boundlessly as perhaps the total nightmare of human society, for instance, with earth, sky, and atmosphere.”

— Georges Bataille

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

— Georges Bataille

86. “The difference between inner experience and philosophy resides principally in this: that in experience, what is stated is nothing, if not a means and even, as much as a means, an obstacle; what counts is no longer the statement of wind, but the wind.”

— Georges Bataille

87. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

88. “I entered into this darkness where, ever since, I plunge deeper every hour and lose myself a little more.”

— Georges Bataille

89. “The miraculous moment is the moment when anticipation dissolves into NOTHING. It is the moment when we are relieved of anticipation, man’s customary misery, of the anticipation that enslaves, that subordinates the present moment to some anticipated result. Precisely in the miracle, we are thrust from our anticipation of the future into the presence of the moment, of the moment illuminated by a miraculous light, the light of the sovereignty of life delivered from its servitude.”

— Georges Bataille

90. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

91. “Simone was tall and lovely. She was usually very natural; there was nothing heartbreaking in her eyes or her voice. But on a sensual level, she so bluntly craved any upheaval that the faintest call from the senses gave her a look directly suggestive of all things linked to deep sexuality, such as blood, suffocation, sudden terror, crime; things indefinitely destroying human bliss and honesty.”

— Georges Bataille

92. “Poetry reveals a power of the unknown. But the unknown is only an insignificant void if it is not the object of a desire. Poetry is a middle term, it conceals the known within the unknown: it is the unknown painted in blinding colors, in the image of a sun.”

— Georges Bataille

93. “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.”

— Georges Bataille

94. “Observing her, I saw that she was made up, that she was in an evening gown, that mourning indecently emphasized her beauty.”

— Georges Bataille

95. “I approach poetry: but only to miss it.”

— Georges Bataille

96. “VII The happiness we find in becoming is possible only by annihilating the reality of “existences” and lovely appearance, and through the pessimistic destruction of illusions: so, by annihilating even the loveliest appearances, Dionysian happiness attains its height.”

— Georges Bataille

97. “We can’t rely on anything. Except ourselves. Ludicrous responsibility devolves on us, overwhelms us. In every regard, right up the present, people always have relied on each other – or God.”

— Georges Bataille

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

— Georges Bataille

99. “The change would be meaningful only if it was the doing of men of unassailable moral authority, speaking to down-to-earth interests on behalf of higher powers. What was needed was less to give complete freedom to the natural impulses of the merchants than to tie them to some dominant moral position.”

— Georges Bataille

100. “The circumstances of my life are paralyzing.”

— Georges Bataille