Quotes from Georges Bataille

Like a woman, possibility makes demands, makes a person go all the way.

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.

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.

Life is whole only when it isn't subordinate to a specific object that exceeds it. In this way, the essence of entirety is freedom.

It is the positive practice of freedom, not the negative struggle against particular oppression, that has lifted me above a mutilated existence.

A life is only a link in the chain. I want other people to continue the experience begun by those before me and dedicate themselves like me and the others before me to this--to go to the furthest reaches of the possible.

Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

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.

Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species 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.

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.

Literature ... is the rediscovery of childhood.

Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one's equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the labors of the mind which incessantly contradict what they have just established.

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.

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.

I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.

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

Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaining it.

In what will survive me I am in harmony with my annihilation.

Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror

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

We have in fact only two certainties in this world - that we are not everything and that we will die.

The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.