Georges Bataille Quotes
Georges Bataille was a French philosopher, novelist, and librarian whose work occupied a singular position at the edges of surrealism, sociology, and the history of religions. After training as a medievalist at the Ecole des Chartes, he spent his career at the Bibliotheque Nationale and in the provincial libraries of Orleans and Carpentras while founding journals and clandestine groups. The quotes below are attributed to Georges Bataille, organized by topic.
Browse Georges Bataille by topic
Georges Bataille on Death
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“Today, I am overjoyed at being an object of horror and repugnance to the one being whom I am bound to... The blank head in which ‘I’ am has become so frightened and greedy that only my death could satisfy it.”
Wikiquote -
“I sank into the moist body the way a well-guided plough sinks into earth. The earth beneath that body lay open like a grave; her naked cleft lay open to me like a freshly dug grave... our bodies were quivering like two rows of teeth chattering together.”
Wikiquote -
“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.”
Erotism: Death and Sensuality(1962) | p. 107 -
“There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.”
Erotism: Death and Sensuality(1962) | The Marquis de Sade , cited by Bataille in Erotism: Death and Sensuality -
“Against this rising tide of murder, far more incisive than life (because blood is more resplendent in death than in life), it will be impossible to set anything but trivialities – the comic entreaties of old ladies.”
Blue of the Noon(1935)
Georges Bataille on Freedom
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Attributed to Georges Bataille:
“Sovereignty is the refusal to accept the limits that the fear of death would impose.”
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“It is the positive practice of freedom, not the negative struggle against particular oppression, that has lifted me above a mutilated existence.”
On Nietzsche(1945) | p. xxvii -
“To choose evil is to choose freedom—“freedom, emancipation from all restraint.””
On Nietzsche(1945) | p. xxxiv, note
Georges Bataille on God
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“I was jealous of people with a God to hang onto, whereas I … soon all I’d have left would be ‘eyes to cry with’.”
Wikiquote -
“Nothing radically changes when instead of human satisfaction, we think of the satisfaction of some heavenly being! God’s person displaces the problem and does not abolish it.”
On Nietzsche(1945) | p. xx -
“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.”
L’Expérience Intérieure(1943) | p. 9
Georges Bataille on Justice
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“We can’t rely on anything. Except ourselves. Ludicrous responsibility devolves on us, overwhelms us. In every regard, right up the present, people always have relied on each other—or God.”
On Nietzsche(1945) | p. 3
Georges Bataille on Knowledge
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“Extreme states of being, whether individual or collective, were once purposefully motivated. Some of those purposes no longer have meaning (expiation, salvation). The well-being of communities is no longer sought through means of doubtful effectiveness , but directly, through action. Under these conditions, extreme states of being fell into the domain of the arts, and not without a certain disadva”
The Bataille Reader (1997), p. 340 -
“I used to shut my eyes and let it shine redly through my lids. The sun was fantastic – it evoked dreams of explosion. Was there anything more sunlike than red blood running over cobblestones, as though light could shatter and kill? Now, in this thick darkness, I’d made myself drunk with light.”
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“I can grovel at His feet if I believe He doesn’t exist.”
Wikiquote -
“He had porcelain-blue eyes that even in a lighted railway car were lost in the clouds, as if he had personally heard the Valkyries’ summons; but no doubt his ear was more attuned to the trumpet-call of the barracks.”
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“The analysis of laughter had opened to me points of contact between the fundamentals of a communal and disciplined emotional knowledge and those of discursive knowledge.”
L’Expérience Intérieure(1943) | p. xxxiii -
“We reach ecstasy by a contestation of knowledge. Were I to stop at ecstasy and grasp it, in the end I would define it.”
L’Expérience Intérieure(1943) | p. 12 -
“I remain in intolerable non-knowledge, which has no other way out than ecstasy itself.”
L’Expérience Intérieure(1943) | p. 12 -
“[Zarathustra] never abandoned the watchword of not having any end, not serving a cause, because, as he knew, causes pluck off the wings we fly with.”
On Nietzsche(1945) | p. xxxii
Georges Bataille on Life
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“All that I had loved during my life rose up like a graveyard of white tombs, in a lunar, spectral light. Fundamentally, this graveyard was a brothel. The funereal marble was alive. In some places it had hair on it.”
Wikiquote -
“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.”
On Nietzsche(1945) | p. xxvii -
“The total person is first disclosed … in areas of life that are lived frivolously.”
On Nietzsche(1945) | p. xxix
Georges Bataille on Love
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Attributed to Georges Bataille:
“Eroticism is the assenting to life up to the point of death.”
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Attributed to Georges Bataille:
“Communication takes place through the wound, not through the seal.”
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“Love then screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun.”
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“Love expresses a need for sacrifice each unity must lose itself in some other which exceeds it. In erotic frenzy the being is led to tear itself apart and lose itself.”
Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939
Georges Bataille on Nature
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“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.”
Wikiquote
Georges Bataille on Politics
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Attributed to Georges Bataille:
“The economy of expenditure is more fundamental than the economy of production.”
Georges Bataille on Truth
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Attributed to Georges Bataille:
“What we cannot grasp is the point of greatest importance.”