168 Quotes by Georges Bataille

Our personal hallucination now developed as boundlessly as perhaps the total nightmare of human society, for instance, with earth, sky, and atmosphere.

The difference between inner experience and philosophy resides principally in this: that in experience, what is stated is nothing, if not a means and even, as much as a means, an obstacle; what counts is no longer the statement of wind, but the wind.

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.

I began to willfully indulge in dreams that, with the help of a bottle of wine, became completely mad and were close to being loathsome.

We have in fact only two certainties in this world – that we are not everything and that we will die.

Los hombres se desconocen el el bien y se aman en el mal. El bien es la hipocresia. El mal es el amor. La inocencia es el amor del pecado.

Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror.

To remain virile in the light demands the audacity of a mad ignorance: letting oneself catch fire, screaming with joy, expecting death – because of an unknown, unknowable presence; becoming love and blind light oneself, attaining the perfect incomprehension of the sun.

In the violence of overcoming, in the disorder of my laughter and my sobbing, in the excess of raptures that shatter me, I seize on the similarity between a horror and a voluptuousness that goes beyond me, between an ultimate pain and an unbearable joy!