Quotes by George Bataille

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

“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.”

“Naturally, Loves the most distant possibility.”

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

“Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognized and stable individuality.”

“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.”

“finds its grandeur and its reality in ecstasy and in ecstatic love”

“Respect is really only a devious route taken by violence.”

“The stirrings within us have their own fearful excesses; the excesses show which way these stirrings would take us. They are simply a sign to remind us constantly that death, the rupture of discontinuous individualities to which we cleave in terror, stands there before us more real than life itself.”

“What kind of power is it that dares intrude between me and my bride, the bride I myself have chosen and who has chosen me? And this power would command her to be true to me; does she then need to be so commanded? And is she to be true to me only because a third party commands it, one whom she therefore loves more than me?”

“In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation.”

“Thanks for your nice little note, though I am sorry to hear you find Through the Looking Glass so uninteresting. You see I have done my best, so it isnt really my fault if you think Tweedledum and Tweedledee stupid, and wish that I had left out all about the train and the gnat.”

“Honour him, dear Symparanekromenoi, for his grey hair and his misfortune.”