Quotes from Georges Bataille

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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

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.