Quotes from Georges Bataille

I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acceptation of a way of life wherein each moment has meaning only in relation to another or others that will follow it.

A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others. In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches. Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms.

Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.

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.

Indeed, the direction of the future is only there in order to elude us.

The owl flies, in the moonlight, over a field where the wounded cry out. Like the owl, I fly in the night over my own misfortune.

It is clear that the world is purely parodic, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.

Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding away inside us; we always want to be sure of the uselessness or the ruinousness of our extravagance.

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

The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life, that life's intimacy does not reveal it's dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out.

I enjoyed the innocence of unhappiness and of helplessness; could I blame myself for a sin which attracted me, which flooded me with pleasure precisely to the extent it brought me to despair?

Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commrnce from that point on.

You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.

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

But a sort of rupture-in anguish-leaves us at the limit of tears: in such a case we lose ourselves, we forget ourselves and communicate with an elusive beyond.

Eroticism is the brink of the abyss. I'm leaning out over deranged horror (at this point my eyes roll back in my head). The abyss is the foundation of the possible. We're brought to the edge of the same abyss by uncontrolled laughter or ecstasy. From this comes a "questioning" of everything possible. This is the stage of rupture, of letting go of things, of looking forward to death.

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

By the care she lavishes on her toilet, by the concern she has for her beauty set off by her adornment, a woman regards herself as an object always trying to attract men's attention.

Not every woman is a prostitute, but prostitution is the natural apotheosis of the feminine attitude.

The emotional element which gives an obsessive value to communal existence is death.

What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners? – A violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?

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

You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.

The difficulty that contestation must be done in the name of an authority is resolved this: I contest in the name of contestation what experience itself is.