Georges Bataille Quotes

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

Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature ...

Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret a...

TO WHOM LIFE IS AN EXPERIENCE TO BE CARRIED AS FAR AS POSSIBLE... I have not meant to express my tho...

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

Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectu...

...being aware that the sacred quality hidden in the experience of eroticism is something impossible...

I remember that one day, when we were in a car tooling along at top speed,we crashed into a cyclist,...

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

Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.

I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acce...

The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life, that life's...

Above all human existence requires stability, the permanence of things. The result is an ambivalence...

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

My conduct with my friends is motivated: each being is, I believe, incapable on his own, of going to...

To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have welded eyes. That is why they fear l...

The fact is, that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisel...

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

These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature. Literature is eithe...

Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be ta...

Intimacy cannot be expressed discursively. The swelling to the bursting point, the malice that break...

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of...