Georges Bataille Quotes

A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.

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

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

Eroticism differs from animal sexuality in that human sexuality is limited by taboos and the domain of eroticism is that of the transgression of these taboos. Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo. It presupposes man in conflict with himself.

Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror

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

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

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

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

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

Eroticism cannot be entirely revealed without poetry.

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.

Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.

The chaos of the mind cannot constitute a reply to the providence of the universe. All it can be is an awakening in the night, where all that can be heard is anguished poetry let loose.

I teach the art of turning anguish into delight.

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.

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

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

You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.

My true church is a whorehouse – the only one that gives me true satisfaction.

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

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?

We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world.

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.

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