French writer & philosopher (1897-1962)
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.
GEORGES BATAILLE
The Trial of Gilles de Rais
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.
GEORGES BATAILLE
"Architecture"
The verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy.
GEORGES BATAILLE
Visions of Excess
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.
GEORGES BATAILLE
Erotism: Death and Sensuality
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.
GEORGES BATAILLE
Inner Experience
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.
GEORGES BATAILLE
Visions of Excess
It is the positive practice of freedom, not the negative struggle against particular oppression, that has lifted me above a mutilated existence.
GEORGES BATAILLE
On Nietzsche
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.
GEORGES BATAILLE
Visions of Excess
Like a woman, possibility makes demands, makes a person go all the way.
GEORGES BATAILLE
On Nietzsche
Like the owl, I fly in the night over my own misfortune.
GEORGES BATAILLE
The Impossible
I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.
GEORGES BATAILLE
Violent Stance
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.
GEORGES BATAILLE
Erotism: Death and Sensuality
Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.
GEORGES BATAILLE
The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge
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.
GEORGES BATAILLE
On Nietzsche
The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.
GEORGES BATAILLE
attributed, "The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille", On Bataille
Indeed, the direction of the future is only there in order to elude us.
GEORGES BATAILLE
Literature and Evil
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.
GEORGES BATAILLE
Erotism: Death and Sensuality
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.
GEORGES BATAILLE
On Nietzsche
The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.
GEORGES BATAILLE
The Accursed Share
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.
GEORGES BATAILLE
Visions of Excess