168 Quotes by Georges Bataille

An immense industrial network cannot be managed in the same way that one changes a tire... It expresses a circuit of cosmic energy on which it depends, which it cannot limit, and whose laws it cannot ignore without consequences.

От само себе си се разбира, че развитието на еротизма с нищо не е външно за областта на религията, но тъкмо християнството, противопоставяйки се на еротизма, е осъдило повечето религии. В някакъв смисъл християнската религия е може би най-нерелигиозната.

I equate love (bodies touching indecently) to the limitlessness of being – to nausea, to the sun, and to death.

The absent and inert girl hanging dreamless from my arms is no more foreign to me than the door or window through which I can look or pass. I rediscover indifference (allowing her to leave me) when I fall asleep, through an inability to love what happens. It is impossible for her to know whom she will discover when I hold her, because she obstinately attains a complete forgetting.

A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.

If poetry introduces the strange, it does so by means of the familiar. The poetic is the familiar dissolving into the strange, and ourselves with it. It never dispossesses us entirely, for the words, the images (once dissolved) are charged with emotions already experienced, attached to objects which link them to the known.

La poesía no es un conocimiento de sí, y menos aún la experiencia de un lejano posible (de lo que anteriormente no existía) sino la simple evocación con palabras de posibilidades inaccesibles.

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.

Entirety exists within me as exuberance … in empty longing … in … the desire to burn with desire.