Quotes from Georges Bataille

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.

From incoherent barkings of desire, man can advance to distinct speech now that, labelling the object with a name, he is able to make an implicit connection between the material it is made of and the work required to get it from the old state to the new in which it is ready for use. Thenceforth language firmly anchors the object in the stream of time.

The opium of the people in the present world is perhaps not so much religion as it is accepted boredom. Such a world is at the mercy, it must be known, of those who provide at least the semblance of an escape from boredom. Human life aspires to the passions, and again encounters its exigencies.

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.

She was so unsettled by love and the sense of her nakedness that her voice shrank in her throat. The peri­ods of the song warbled through the room. Her whole body seemed ablaze . The drunken , singing head shook with some delirious impulse that seemed to be destroy­ ing her. What insanity! She was weeping, in her wild nakedness, as she approached my bed, which to me was a death bed. She fell on her knees, she fell down in front of me and hid her tears in the sheets.

Los hombres se desconocen el el bien y se aman en el mal. El bien es la hipocresia. El mal es el amor. La inocencia es el amor del pecado.

I began to willfully indulge in dreams that, with the help of a bottle of wine, became completely mad and were close to being loathsome.

Lo serio, la muerte y el dolor fundan la verdad obtusa. Pero lo serio de la muerte y el dolor es la servidumbre del pensamiento.

El tiempo no significa más que la huida de los objetos que parecían verdaderos.

If ultimately there was a tantalizing rectitude about her, she was none the less cunning: her exceeding gentleness, howbeit mitigated sometimes by the disturbing oppressiveness that foretells a storm in the air, left me utterly blind.

Le monde sent la mort Les oiseaux volent les yeux crevés Tu es sombre comme un ciel noir.

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

I entered into this darkness where, ever since, I plunge deeper every hour and lose myself a little more.

you will recognize happines when you see it die

The true luxury and the real potlatch of our times falls to the poverty-stricken, that is, to the individual who lies down and scoffs. A genuine luxury requires the complete contempt for riches, the somber indifference of the individual who refuses to work and makes his life on the one hand an infinitely ruined splendor, and on the other, a silent insult to the laborious lie of the rich.

The taboo does not banish the transgression but, on the contrary, depends upon it, just as the transgression depends on the existence of the taboo: "The transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it

the word silence is still a sound, to speak is in itself to imagine knowing; and to no longer know, it would be necessary to no longer speak

being aware that the sacred quality hidden in the experience of eroticism is something impossible for language to reach (this is also due to the impossibility of experiencing of re-experiencing anything through language), Bataille still expresses it in words. (Mishima on Bataille)

A la rigueur, je suis heureux qu'on ait à rire de ma tristesse : seul m'entend celui dont le cÅ"ur est blessé d'une incurable blessure, telle que jamais nul n'en voulut guérir...

We can't rely on anything. Except ourselves. Ludicrous responsibility devolves on us, overwhelms us. In every regard, right up the present, people always have relied on each other—or God.

What seems to be unspeakable weakness can sometimes be just distaste for the generally accepted morality.

To choose evil is to choose freedom—"freedom, emancipation from all restraint.

Deneyin bizi al?p götürdüÄŸü yere götürmesini istedim.

Simone was tall and lovely. She was usually very natural; there was nothing heartbreaking in her eyes or her voice. But on a sensual level, she so bluntly craved any upheaval that the faintest call from the senses gave her a look directly suggestive of all things linked to deep sexuality, such as blood, suffocation, sudden terror, crime; things indefinitely destroying human bliss and honesty.