Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille
Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataillewas a French intellectual and literary figure working in literature, philosophy, anthropology, economics, sociology and history of art. His writing, which included essays, novels, and poetry, explored such subjects as eroticism, mysticism, surrealism, and transgression. His work would prove influential on subsequent schools of philosophy and social theory, including post-structuralism...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth16 September 1897
CountryFrance
Georges Bataille quotes about
By the care she lavishes on her toilet, by the concern she has for her beauty set off by her adornment, a woman regards herself as an object always trying to attract men's attention.
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.
Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror
My true church is a whorehouse – the only one that gives me true satisfaction.
Entirety exists within me as exuberance ... in empty longing ... in ... the desire to burn with desire.
Not every woman is a prostitute, but prostitution is the natural apotheosis of the feminine attitude.
Thought does not ennoble us and neither does it differentiate humans from other animals.
A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others. In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches. Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms.
The owl flies, in the moonlight, over a field where the wounded cry out. Like the owl, I fly in the night over my own misfortune.
We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world.
To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have welded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savor the "pleasures of the flesh" only on the condition that they may be insipid.
We have in fact only two certainties in this world - that we are not everything and that we will die.
It is clear that the world is purely parodic, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.
Incredible nervous state, trepidation beyond words: to be this much in love is to be sick (and I love to be sick).