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1 " The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life, that life's intimacy does not reveal it's dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out. "
― Georges Bataille , Theory of Religion
2 " I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction. "
― Georges Bataille , Violent Silence: Celebrating Georges Bataille
3 " Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader. "
― Georges Bataille
4 " TO WHOM LIFE IS AN EXPERIENCE TO BE CARRIED AS FAR AS POSSIBLE... I have not meant to express my thought but to help you clarify what you yourself think... You are not any more different from me than your right leg is from your left, but what joins us is THE SLEEP OF REASON—WHICH PRODUCES MONSTERS.—Theory of Religion "
5 " I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acceptation of a way of life wherein each moment has meaning only in relation to another or others that will follow it. "
― Georges Bataille , The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge
6 " Above all human existence requires stability, the permanence of things. The result is an ambivalence with respect to all great and violent expenditure of strength; such an expenditure, whether in nature or in man, represents the strongest possible threat. The feelings of admiration and of ecstasy induced by them thus mean that we are concerned to admire them from afar. The sun corresponds to that prudent concern. It is all radiance gigantic loss of heat and light, flame, explosion; but remote from men, who can enjoy in safety and quiet the fruits of this cataclysm. To earth belongs the solidity which sustains houses of stone and the steps of men (at least on its surface, for buried within the depths of the earth is the incandescence of lava). "
― Georges Bataille ,
7 " Intimacy cannot be expressed discursively. The swelling to the bursting point, the malice that breaks out with clenched teeth and weeps; the sinking feeling that doesn't know where it comes from or what it's about; the fear that sings its head off in the dark; the white-eyed pallor, the sweet sadness, the rage and the vomiting...are so many evasions. What is intimate, in the strong sense, is what has the passion of an absence of individuality, the imperceptible sonority of a river, the empty limpidity of the sky "
8 " I remember that one day, when we were in a car tooling along at top speed,we crashed into a cyclist, an apparently very young and very pretty girl. Her head was almost totally ripped off by the wheels. For a long time, we were parked a few yards beyond without getting out, fully absorbed in the sight of the corpse. The horror and despair at so much bloody flesh, nauseating in part, and in part very beautiful, was fairly equivalent to our usual impression upon seeing one another. "
― Georges Bataille , Story of the Eye
9 " These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature. Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil—an acute form of Evil—which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a 'hypermorality.'Literature is communication. Communication requires loyalty. A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.—Literature and Evil "
10 " If literature stays away from evil, it rapidly becomes boring. "
11 " Man always becomes other. Man is the animal who continually differs from himself. "
― Georges Bataille , The Bataille Reader
12 " Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude. "
13 " The fact is, that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted that mind . . . From the very first he set before the consciousness things which it could not tolerate. "
14 " The emotional element which gives an obsessive value to communal existence is death. "
15 " 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. "
― Georges Bataille , Guilty
16 " I don't want your love unless you know I am repulsive, and love me even as you know it. "
17 " ...being aware that the sacred quality hidden in the experience of eroticism is something impossible for language to reach (this is also due to the impossibility of experiencing of re-experiencing anything through language), Bataille still expresses it in words. (Mishima on Bataille) "
― Georges Bataille , My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man
18 " 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. "
19 " Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison. "
20 " Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion. "
