Quotes from Georges Bataille

je saisis en sombrant que la seule verité de l'homme, enfin entrevue, est d'être une supplication sans réponse.

Starry sky my sister cursed men star your death the light of a great cold solitude of lightning absence of humanity at last I empty myself of memories a desert sun effaces my name star I see its silence ice it cries out like a wolf on my back I fall to the ground it kills me I guess.

Intimacy is never separated from external elements, without which it could not be signified. Where we think we have caught hold of the Grail, we have only grasped a thing, and what is left in our hands is only a cooking pot.

if I did not love death my suffering my desire for you would kill me your absence your distress make me nauseous it's time for me to love death it's time to bite its hands

Christianity dates from the individual birth of a redeeming god; Islam, from the birth of a community, of a new kind of state, which did not have its basis in either blood or place. Islam differs from Christianity and Buddhism in that it became, after the Hegira, something different from a teaching propagated in the framework of a society already formed (a local or blood community). It was the establishment of a society based on the new teaching.

I already knew this immense tenderness, which is only the last degree of sorrow… I knew then, already, that the intimacy of things is death.

Life will dissolve itself in death, rivers in the sea, and the known in the unknown.

One cannot all of a sudden deprive a society of its essence.

the universe is within me as it is within itself nothing separates us anymore I bump against it in myself

I saw your sad as if a charity in radiant in night long morphic sheen and tears the tomb of your infinity. — Georges Bataille, from "Je revais de toucher" in "5 poems," Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics , a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle, Volume III, issue 4, December 2008

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

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

VII The happiness we find in becoming is possible only by annihilating the reality of "existences" and lovely appearance, and through the pessimistic destruction of illusions: so, by annihilating even the loveliest appearances, Dionysian happiness attains its height.

The miraculous moment is the moment when anticipation dissolves into NOTHING. It is the moment when we are relieved of anticipation, man's customary misery, of the anticipation that enslaves, that subordinates the present moment to some anticipated result. Precisely in the miracle, we are thrust from our anticipation of the future into the presence of the moment, of the moment illuminated by a miraculous light, the light of the sovereignty of life delivered from its servitude

Poetry reveals a power of the unknown. But the unknown is only an insignificant void if it is not the object of a desire. Poetry is a middle term, it conceals the known within the unknown: it is the unknown painted in blinding colors, in the image of a sun.

The difference between inner experience and philosophy resides principally in this: that in experience, what is stated is nothing, if not a means and even, as much as a means, an obstacle; what counts is no longer the statement of wind, but the wind.

Anguish is what makes humankind, it seems; not anguish alone, but anguish transcended and the act of transcending it.

If I were to be asked what we are, I should answer: 'We are the door to everything that can be, we are the expectation that no material response can satisfy, no trick with words deceive. We seek the heights. Each one of us can ignore this search if he has a mind to, but mankind as a whole aspires to these heights; they are the only definition of his nature, his only justification and significance.

The absent and inert girl hanging dreamless from my arms is no more foreign to me than the door or window through which I can look or pass. I rediscover indifference (allowing her to leave me) when I fall asleep, through an inability to love what happens. It is impossible for her to know whom she will discover when I hold her, because she obstinately attains a complete forgetting.

Il faut vouloir vivre les grands problèmes, par le corps et par l'esprit

only poetry, exempt from all practical applications, permits one to have at its disposal, to a certain extent, the brilliance and suffocation that Marquis de Sade tried so indecently to provoke.` Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess. Selected Writings 1927-1939, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2004, p. 93

The lover strips the beloved of her identity no less than the blood-stained priest his human or animal victim.

La vie animale est entièrement issue du mouvement des mers et, à l'intérieur des corps, la vie continue à sortir de l'eau salée.

only poetry, exempt from all practical applications, permits one to have at its disposal, to a certain extent, the brilliance and suffocation that Marquis de Sade tried so indecently to provoke.