Georges Bataille Quotes

Human entirety can only be what it is when giving up the addiction to others’ ends.

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.

In the helter-skelter of this book, I didn’t develop my views as theory. In fact, I even believe that efforts of that kind are tainted with ponderousness. Nietzsche wrote “with his blood,” and criticizing, or, better, experiencing him means pouring out one’s lifeblood. … It was only with my life that I wrote the Nietzsche book that I had planned.

Inevitably linked with the moment of climax, there is a minor rupture suggestive of death; and conversely the idea of death may play a part in setting sensuality in motion.

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

All that I had loved during my life rose up like a graveyard of white tombs, in a lunar, spectral light. Fundamentally, this graveyard was a brothel. The funereal marble was alive. In some places it had hair on it.

The advance of intelligence diminished, as a secondary consequence, the “possible” in a realm which appeared foreign to intelligence: that of inner experience.
To say “diminished” is even to say too little. The development of intelligence leads to a drying up of life which, in return, has narrowed intelligence. It is only if I state this principle: “inner experience itself is authority” that I emerge from this impotence.

In previous conditions, extreme states came under the jurisdiction of the arts... People substituted writing (fiction) for what was once spiritual life, poetry (chaotic words) for actual ecstasies. Art constitutes a minor free zone outside action, paying for its freedom by giving up the real world. A heavy price!

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

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.

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

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.

Experience is, in fever and anguish, the putting into question (to the test) of that which a man knows of being. Should he in this fever have any apprehension whatsoever, he cannot say: “I have seen God, the absolute, or the depths of the universe”; he can only say “that which I have seen eludes understanding”—and God, the absolute, the depths of the universe are nothing if they are not categories of the understanding. If I said decisively, “I have seen God,” that which I see would change. Instead of the inconceivable unknown—wildly free before me, leaving me wild and free before it—there would be a dead object and the thing of the theologian, to which the unknown would be subjugated.

Love then screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun.

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.