Georges Bataille

When all is said and done, I have more than one face. I don't know which is laughing at which.

[Georges Bataille @GeorgesBataille]

Far beyond the failings of friends or readers I am close to, I am now seeking friends and readers that a dead man might meet and, in advance, I see them as faithful, innumerable, silent: stars in the sky! My laughter, my madness reveals you and my death will join you.

[Georges Bataille @GeorgesBataille]

It often happens that a dream allows us an anguished glimpse of a perfect possibility which it reveals at the last moment, as if a confused reply were the only one capricious enough to satisfy an exasperated desire.

[Georges Bataille @GeorgesBataille]

A genuine luxury requires the complete contempt for riches, the sombre indifference of the individual who refuses to work and makes his life on the one hand an infinitely ruined splendour, and on the other, a silent insult to the laborious lie of the rich.

[Georges Bataille @GeorgesBataille]

. . . and I was no longer able to doubt that the lot and the infinite tumult of human life were open to those who could no longer exist as empty eye sockets, but as seers swept away by an overwhelming dream they could not own.

[Georges Bataille @GeorgesBataille]

Existence is not only an agitated void, it is a dance that forces one to dance with fanaticism. Thought that does not have a dead fragment as its object has the inner existence of flames.

[Georges Bataille @GeorgesBataille]

To subordinate ourselves to the POSSIBLE is to let ourselves banish stars, winds, and volcanoes from the sovereign world.

[Georges Bataille @GeorgesBataille]

The passion of the self, love burning within it, seeks an object. The self is only liberated outside of itself.

[Georges Bataille @GeorgesBataille]

All profound life is heavy with the impossible.

[Georges Bataille @GeorgesBataille]

Where is this insipid cloud of thoughts headed--this cloud which I imagine to be similar to the sudden blood in a wounded throat?

[Georges Bataille @GeorgesBataille]

The servant of experience is discursive thought. Here, the nobility of the servant rests upon the discipline of the servitude.

[Georges Bataille @GeorgesBataille]

Despair is simple: it is the absence of hope, of all enticement. It is the state of deserted expanses and--I can imagine--of the sun.

[Georges Bataille @GeorgesBataille]

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.

[Georges Bataille @GeorgesBataille]

A febrile unrest within us asks death to wreak its havoc at our expense.

[Georges Bataille @GeorgesBataille]

There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.

[Georges Bataille @GeorgesBataille]

In the prison house of the body what can we do, other than provoke glimpses of something beginning beyond the walls?

[Georges Bataille @GeorgesBataille]

God is dead. He's so dead, in fact, that the only way to make this comprehensible is by killing myself.

[Georges Bataille @GeorgesBataille]

To speak about the absolute: an ignoble phrase, an inhuman term!
Something you would imagine ghosts longing for.

[Georges Bataille @GeorgesBataille]

Logic on its death bed gave birth to mad riches.

[Georges Bataille @GeorgesBataille]

Chance: I imagine, in the gloom of night, a knife-tip entering my heart, a happiness beyond limits, unbearable happiness . . .

[Georges Bataille @GeorgesBataille]

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