Quotes from Georges Bataille

Her lips pale, her face red from the cold, Dorothea said nothing. She ate a kind of cake she was fond of. She was still beautiful; nevertheless her face kept dissolving in that light, dissolving in the grey of the sky.

The announcement of a vast project is always its betrayal.

No soy un hombre de ciencia en el sentido de que hablo de experiencia interior, no de objetos; pero, en el momento en que hablo de objetos, lo hago como los hombres de ciencia, con el rigor que es inevitable.

The change would be meaningful only if it was the doing of men of unassailable moral authority, speaking to down-to-earth interests on behalf of higher powers. What was needed was less to give complete freedom to the natural impulses of the merchants than to tie them to some dominant moral position.

we did not lack modesty—on the contrary—but something urgently drove us to defy modesty as immodestly as possible.

Incredible nervous state, trepidation beyond words: to be this much in love is to be sick (and I love to be sick).

Life has always taken place in a tumult without apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and its reality in ecstasy and in ecstatic love.

To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.

We did not lack modesty—on the contrary—but something urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible.

The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.

The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.

A judgment about life has no meaning except the truth of the one who speaks last, and the mind is at ease only at the moment when everyone is shouting at once and no one can hear a thing.

The warrior's nobility is like a prostitute's smile, the truth of which is self-interest.

The truth is paradoxical to the extent of being exactly contrary to the usual perception.

Naturally, love's the most distant possibility.

I don't want your love unless you know I am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.

The great monuments are raised up like dams, pitting the logic of majesty and authority against all the shady elements: it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak and impose silence on the multitudes.

Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that specieas alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us.

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.

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.

Like the owl, I fly in the night over my own misfortune.

The verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy.

Philosophy ... finds itself to be no longer anything but the heir to a fabulous mystical theology, but missing a God and wiping the slate clean.

There is always some limit which the individual accepts. He identifies this limit with himself. Horror seizes him at the thought that this limit may cease to be. But we are wrong to take this limit and the individual's acceptance of it seriously. The limit is only there to be overreached. Fear and horror are not the real and final reaction; on the contrary, they are a temptation to overstep the bounds.