168 Quotes by Georges Bataille

I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.

The opium of the people in the present world is perhaps not so much religion as it is accepted boredom. Such a world is at the mercy, it must be known, of those who provide at least the semblance of an escape from boredom. Human life aspires to the passions, and again encounters its exigencies.

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 commence from that point on.

Christianity dates from the individual birth of a redeeming god; Islam, from the birth of a community, of a new kind of state, which did not have its basis in either blood or place. Islam differs from Christianity and Buddhism in that it became, after the Hegira, something different from a teaching propagated in the framework of a society already formed (a local or blood community). It was the establishment of a society based on the new teaching.

Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.

Under the present conditions, everything conspires to obscure the basic movement that tends to restore wealth to its function, to gift-giving, to squandering without reciprocation.

We pedaled rapidly, without laughing or speaking, peculiarly satisfied with our mutual presence, akin to one another in the common isolation of lewdness, weariness, and absurdity.

Intimacy is never separated from external elements, without which it could not be signified. Where we think we have caught hold of the Grail, we have only grasped a thing, and what is left in our hands is only a cooking pot.

Man always becomes other. Man is the animal who continually differs from himself.