168 Quotes by Georges Bataille

In effect, vice turns common sense upside-down, and he who admits himself to be vicious abides by stigmatizing terms of horror.

Only literature could reveal the process of breaking the law – without which the law would have no end – independently of the necessity to create order.

Charles Baudelaire’s refusal was the most profound form of refusal, for it was in no way the assertion of an opposite principle. It only expressed that which was indefensible and impossible in the poet’s obstructed state of mind.

Life will dissolve itself in death, rivers in the sea, and the known in the unknown.

Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one’s equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the labors of the mind which incessantly contradict what they have just established.

Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death.

Nous nous approchons du vide, mais ce n’est pas pour y tomber. Nous voulons nous griser de vertige et l’image de la chute y suffit.

Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commrnce from that point on.

Let me stress that in this work flights of Christian religious experience and bursts of erotic impulses are seen to be part and parcel of the same movement.