Georges Bataille Quotes

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.

The total person is first disclosed … in areas of life that are lived frivolously.

Man's secret horror of his foot is one of the explanations for the tendency to conceal its length and form as much as possible. Heels of greater or lesser height, depending on the sex, distract from the foot's low and flat character. Besides the uneasiness is often confused with a sexual uneasiness; this is especially striking among the Chinese who, after having atrophied the feet of women, situate them at the most excessive point of deviance. The husband himself must not see the nude feet of his wife, and it is incorrect and immoral in general to look at the feet of women. Catholic confessors, adapting themselves to this aberration, ask their Chinese penitents "if they have not looked at women's feet.

I used to shut my eyes and let it shine redly through my lids. The sun was fantastic – it evoked dreams of explosion. Was there anything more sunlike than red blood running over cobblestones, as though light could shatter and kill? Now, in this thick darkness, I’d made myself drunk with light.

There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.

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

Each peal of music in the night was an incantatory summons to war and murder. The drum rolls were raised to their paroxysm in the expectation of an ultimate release in bloody salvos of artillery.

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.

I sank into the moist body the way a well-guided plough sinks into earth. The earth beneath that body lay open like a grave; her naked cleft lay open to me like a freshly dug grave... our bodies were quivering like two rows of teeth chattering together.

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

He had porcelain-blue eyes that even in a lighted railway car were lost in the clouds, as if he had personally heard the Valkyries’ summons; but no doubt his ear was more attuned to the trumpet-call of the barracks.

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.

All eroticism has a sacramental character.

It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.

Entirety exists within me as exuberance … in empty longing … in … the desire to burn with desire.