Georges Bataille Quotes

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

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

A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.

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

Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.

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.

Space echoes like an immense tomb, yet the stars still burn. Why does the sun take so long to die ?

Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror

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

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

We have in fact only two certainties in this world - that we are not everything and that we will die.

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

Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.

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.

Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding away inside us; we always want to be sure of the uselessness or the ruinousness of our extravagance.

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

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?

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.

No greater desire exists than a wounded person's need for another wound.

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.

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.

Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Do we really lack the delicacy to let God die quietly, on his own, like a dog?

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.

To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have gelded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savor the "pleasures of the flesh" only on condition that they be insipid. But as of then, no doubt existed for me: I did not care for what is known as "pleasures of the flesh" because they really are insipid; I cared only for what is classified as "dirty." On the other hand, I was not even satisfied with the usual debauchery, because the only thing it dirties is debauchery itself, while, in some way or other, anything sublime and perfectly pure is left intact by it. My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.

Eroticism is the brink of the abyss. I'm leaning out over deranged horror (at this point my eyes roll back in my head). The abyss is the foundation of the possible. We're brought to the edge of the same abyss by uncontrolled laughter or ecstasy. From this comes a "questioning" of everything possible. This is the stage of rupture, of letting go of things, of looking forward to death.

To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have welded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savor the "pleasures of the flesh" only on the condition that they may be insipid.

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.

I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night.

Man always becomes other. Man is the animal who continually differs from himself.

Literature is communication. Communication requires loyalty. A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.

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

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.

Suffering must be obviously futile if it is to be 'educational'. It is for this reason that our history is so unintelligible, and indeed, nothing that was true has ever made sense. 'Why was so much pain necessary?' we foolishly ask. But it is precisely because history has made no sense that we have learnt from it, and the lesson remains a brutal one.

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.

It has always been possible to say "The moral emptiness of today's world is appalling."

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 commence from that point on.

If poetry introduces the strange, it does so by means of the familiar. The poetic is the familiar dissolving into the strange, and ourselves with it. It never dispossesses us entirely, for the words, the images (once dissolved) are charged with emotions already experienced, attached to objects which link them to the known.

I'm also a book nerd so aside from my life and my opinions, you could say my lyrics are inspired in some sense by the writings of Guy Debord, John Berryman, Georges Bataille, T.S. Eliot, Albert Camus, Bukowski, Artaud, Derrick Jensen and bunch of other people.

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

If there is a conclusion it is zero.

That sand into which we bury ourselves in order not to see, is formed of words…and it is true that words, their labyrinths, the exhausting immensity of their “possibles”, in short their treachery, have something of quicksand about them.

Above all human existence requires stability, the permanence of things. The result is an ambivalence with respect to all great and violent expenditure of strength; such an expenditure, whether in nature or in man, represents the strongest possible threat. The feelings of admiration and of ecstasy induced by them thus mean that we are concerned to admire them from afar. The sun corresponds to that prudent concern. It is all radiance gigantic loss of heat and light, flame, explosion; but remote from men, who can enjoy in safety and quiet the fruits of this cataclysm. To earth belongs the solidity which sustains houses of stone and the steps of men (at least on its surface, for buried within the depths of the earth is the incandescence of lava).

Ever since it became theoretically evident that our precious personal identities were just brand-tags for trading crumbs of labour-power on the libidino-economic junk circuit, the vestiges of authorial theatricality have been wearing thinner.

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

The circumstances of my life are paralyzing.

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.

Under the present conditions, everything conspires to obscure the basic movement that tends to restore wealth to its function, to gift-giving, to squandering without reciprocation.

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

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.

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!

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.

Matter signals to its lost voyagers, telling them that their quest is vain, and that their homeland already lies in ashes behind them.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I equate love (bodies touching indecently) to the limitlessness of being – to nausea, to the sun, and to death.

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

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.

…I felt as if I were living only in order to be more aware that I was dead.

The fascination of sleep, which pits the lure of the void against the obstinacy of an impotent will, is an obstacle that life has perhaps never surmounted.

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.

An immense industrial network cannot be managed in the same way that one changes a tire... It expresses a circuit of cosmic energy on which it depends, which it cannot limit, and whose laws it cannot ignore without consequences.

La poesía no es un conocimiento de sí, y menos aún la experiencia de un lejano posible (de lo que anteriormente no existía) sino la simple evocación con palabras de posibilidades inaccesibles.

I remember that one day, when we were in a car tooling along at top speed,we crashed into a cyclist, an apparently very young and very pretty girl. Her head was almost totally ripped off by the wheels. For a long time, we were parked a few yards beyond without getting out, fully absorbed in the sight of the corpse. The horror and despair at so much bloody flesh, nauseating in part, and in part very beautiful, was fairly equivalent to our usual impression upon seeing one another.

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.

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.

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.

TO WHOM LIFE IS AN EXPERIENCE TO BE CARRIED AS FAR AS POSSIBLE... I have not meant to express my thought but to help you clarify what you yourself think... You are not any more different from me than your right leg is from your left, but what joins us is THE SLEEP OF REASON—WHICH PRODUCES MONSTERS. —Theory of Religion

To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have gelded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savour the “pleasures of the flesh” only on condition that they be insipid.

And, writing to you, I know that I cannot speak to you, but there is no way of preventing myself from speaking. I am going abroad, as far away as possible, but everywhere I go I shall be in the same delirium, the same whether far from you or near, for the pleasure in me depends on no one, it emanates from me alone, from the imbalance in me which perpetually frays my nerves. You can see it for yourself, you aren’t the cause of it, I can do without you and I want you at a distance from me, but if you are involved, if it be a question of you, then I want to be in this delirium, I want you to behold it, I want it to destroy you.

We have in fact only two certainties in this world—that we are not everything and that we will die. To be conscious of not being everything, as one is of being mortal, is nothing. But if we are without a narcotic, an unbreathable void reveals itself. I wanted to be everything, so that falling into this void, I might summon my courage and say to myself: “I am ashamed of having wanted to be everything, for I see now that it was to sleep.” From that moment begins a singular experience. The mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy coexist.

Twenty years later, the boy who used to stick himself with pens was standing under the sky in a for­eign street where he had never been, waiting for some unknown, impossible event. There were stars: an infinity of stars. It was absurd - absurd enough to make you scream; but it was a hostile absurdity.

A muchos el universo les parece honrado; las gentes honestas tienen los ojos castrados. Por eso temen la obscenidad. No sienten ninguna angustia cuando oyen el grito del gallo ni cuando se pasean bajo un cielo estrellado. Cuando se entregan 'a los placeres de la carne' lo hacen a condición de que sean insípidos.

The road to the kingdom of childhood, governed by ingenuousness and innocence, is thus regained in the horror of atonement. The purity of love is regained in its intimate truth which, as I said, is that of death. Death and the instant of divine intoxication merge when they both oppose those intentions of Good which are based on rational calculation. And death indicates the instant which, in so far as it is instantaneous, renounces the calculated quest for survival. The instant of the new individual being depended on the death of other beings. Had they not died there would have been no room for new ones. Reproduction and death condition the immortal renewal of life; they condition the instant which is always new. That is why we can only have a tragic view of the enchantment of life, but that is also why tragedy is the symbol of enchantment.

Pathetic creatures on their knees... Tirelessly, naively repeating, "Don't take our word for it! Alas, we're not all that logical. We say God–though in reality God is a person, a particular individual. We speak to him. We address him by name–he is the God of Abraham and Jacob. We treat him just like anybody else, like a personal being..." "So he's a whore?

In essence, love raises the feeling of one being for another to such a pitch that the threatened loss of the beloved or the loss of his love is felt no less keenly than the threat of death. Hence love is based on a desire to live in anguish in the presence of an object of such high worth that the heart cannot bear to contemplate losing it. The fever of the senses is not a desire to die. Nor is love the desire to lose but the desire to live in fear of possible loss, with the beloved holding the lover on the very threshold of a swoon. At that price alone can we feel the violence of rapture before the beloved.

These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature. Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil—an acute form of Evil—which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a 'hypermorality.' Literature is communication. Communication requires loyalty. A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication. —Literature and Evil

Human life is exhausted from serving as the head of, or the reason for, the universe. To the extent that it becomes this head and this reason, to the extent that it becomes necessary to the universe, it accepts servitude. If it is not free, existence becomes empty or neutral, and if it is free, it is in play. The Earth, as long as it only gave rise to cataclysms, trees, and birds, was a free universe; the fascination of freedom was tarnished when the Earth produced a being who demanded necessity as law above the universe. Man however has remained free not to respond to any necessity; he is free to resemble everything that is not himself in the universe. He can set aside the thought that it is he or God who keeps the rest of things from being absurd.

These moments of intoxication, when we defy everything, when, the anchor raised, we go merrily toward the abyss, with no more thought for the inevitable fall than for the limits given in the beginning, are the only ones when we are completely free of the ground (of laws) … Nothing exists that doesn’t have this senseless sense - common to flames, dreams, uncontrollable laughter - in those moments when consumption accelerates, beyond the desire to endure. Even utter senselessness ultimately is always this sense made of the negation of all the others. (Isn’t this sense basically that of each particular being who, as such, is the senselessness of all the others, but only if he doesn’t care a damn about enduring - and thought (philosophy) is at the limit of this conflagration, like a candle blown out at the limit of a flame.)

La evocación tiene sobre la experiencia la ventaja de una riqueza y de una facilidad infinita pero aparta de la experiencia (esencialmente paralizada). Sin la exuberancia de la evocación, la experiencia sería razonable. Comienza a partir de mi locura, si la impotencia de la evocación me asquea. La poesía abre la noche al exceso del deseo. La noche que han dejado los estragos de la poesía es en mí la medida de un rechazo —de mi loca voluntad de desbordar el mundo—. También la poesía desbordaba ese mundo, pero no podía cambiarme. Mi libertad ficticia aseguró ante todo que no destruía la ley de lo dado por la naturaleza. Si me hubiera conformado, me habría sometido con el tiempo a la dimensión de lo dado.

Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding away inside us; we always want to be sure of the uselessness or the ruinousness of our extravagance. We want to feel as remote from the world as we can. As remote as we can: that is hardly strong enough; we want a world turned upside down and inside out. The truth of eroticism is treason. De Sade’s system is the ruinous form of eroticism. Moral isolation means that all breaks are off; it shows what spending can really mean. The man who admits the value of other people necessarily imposes limits upon himself. The respect of man to man leads to a cycle of servitude that allows only for minor moments of disorder and finally ends the respect that their attitude is based on since we are denying the sovereign moment to man in general.

In a world divided between theistic enthusiasts and secularist depressives there is little patience for the atheist who nurtures a passionate hatred for God. The mixture of naturalism and blasphemy that characterizes the Sadean text occupies the space of our blindness, to which Bataille’s writings are not unreasonably assimilated. If there is contradiction here it is one that is coextensive with the unconscious; the consequence of a revolt incommensurate with the ontological weight of its object. That God has wrought such loathesomeness without even having existed only exacerbates the hatred pitched against him. An atheism that does not hunger for God’s blood is an inanity, and the anaemic feebleness of secular rationalism has so little appeal that it approximates to an argument for his existence. What is suggested by the Sadean furore is that anyone who does not exult at the thought of driving nails through the limbs of the Nazarene is something less than an atheist; merely a disappointed slave.

Continuaba cuestionando los límites del mundo, al ver la miseria de quien con ellos se conforma, y no pude soportar por mucho tiempo lo fácil de la ficción: yo le exigía la realidad, me volví loco. Si mentía, me quedaba en el plano de la poesía, de una superación verbal del mundo. Si perseveraba en una denigración ciega del mundo, mi denigración era falsa (como la superación). En cierto modo, mi conformidad con el mundo se profundizaba. Pero al no poder mentir a sabiendas, me volví loco (capaz de ignorar la verdad). O al no saber ya, para mí solo, representar la comedia de un delirio, me volví loco pero interiormente: viví la experiencia de la noche. La poesía dio simplemente un giro: escapé por ella del mundo del discurso, que para mí se había convertido en el mundo natural, entré con ella en una especie de tumba donde la infinitud de lo posible nacía de la muerte del mundo lógico. Al morir la lógica, daba a luz locas riquezas. Pero lo posible evocado no es sino irreal, la muerte del mundo lógico es irreal, todo es turbio y huidizo en esta oscuridad relativa. Puedo burlarme de mí mismo y de los demás: ¡todo lo real carece de valor, todo valor es irreal! De allí esa facilidad y esa fatalidad de deslizamientos en los que ignoro si miento o estoy loco. La necesidad de la noche procede de esa situación desafortunada. La noche no podía sino desviarse de todo ello. El cuestionarlo todo nacía de la exasperación de un deseo, ¡que no podía abocar al vacío! El objeto de mi deseo era, en primer lugar, la ilusión y no pudo ser más que en segundo lugar el vacío de la desilusión.