Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Georges Bataille (French Essayist, Intellectual)

Georges Bataille (1897–1962,) fully Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille, was a French librarian, religious historian, philosopher, and novelist. His diverse writings—essays, novels, and poetry—expressed his fascination with eroticism, mysticism, and the irrational.

Born in Billom, a commune in the Auvergne district, Bataille trained as an archivist at the École des Chartes (National School of Palaeography and Archival Studies) in Paris. He worked as a librarian and a medieval specialist at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris until 1942 and became the keeper of the Orléans library in 1951. He also edited numerous scholarly journals and was the founding editor of Critique, an influential literary review.

Bataille’s first novels were Histoire de l’œil (1928, The Story of the Eye) on sexual excess and Madame Edwarda (1937,) written with the pseudonyms Lord Auch and Pierre Angélique respectively. Le Coupable (1944; Guilty) was the first major literary work published under his own name. La Littérature et le mal (1957; Literature and Evil) and L’Érotisme (1957; Eroticism) followed. He also wrote Lascaux; ou, la naissance de l’art (1955; Lascaux; or, The Birth of Art,) and Manet (1955.)

Bataille’s philosophy was dominated by themes such as an obsession with the erotic, myth, sacrifice, the nature of excess, profanity, heterogeneity, and social transgression. Bataille’s philosophical texts include La Part maudite (3 vols., 1949; The Accursed Share, 1991.) His complete works are published as Œuvres complètes (12 vols., 1970–88.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Georges Bataille

The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.
Georges Bataille
Topics: Mental Illness

Life has always taken place in a tumult without apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and its reality in ecstasy and in ecstatic love.
Georges Bataille
Topics: Passion

Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.
Georges Bataille
Topics: Sex

A judgment about life has no meaning except the truth of the one who speaks last, and the mind is at ease only at the moment when everyone is shouting at once and no one can hear a thing.
Georges Bataille
Topics: Judges, Judgment, Judging

To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.
Georges Bataille
Topics: God

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.
Georges Bataille
Topics: Morality, Morals

Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one’s equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the labors of the mind which incessantly contradict what they have just established.
Georges Bataille
Topics: Sanity

The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility.
Georges Bataille
Topics: Slavery

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

Each of us is incomplete compared to someone else—an animal’s incomplete compared to a person… and a person compared to God, who is complete only to be imaginary.
Georges Bataille

Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us.
Georges Bataille
Topics: Crime, Criminals

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.
Georges Bataille
Topics: Despair

Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit; to become delightful, happiness must be tainted with poison.
Georges Bataille
Topics: Pleasure, Happiness, Merit

Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognized and stable individuality.
Georges Bataille
Topics: Individuality

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.
Georges Bataille
Topics: Beauty

At man’s core there is a voice that wants him never to give in to fear. But if it is true that in general man cannot give in to fear, at the very least he postpones indefinitely the moment when he will have to confront himself with the object of his fear… when he will no longer have the assistance of reason as guaranteed by God, or when he will no longer have the assistance of God such as reason guaranteed. It is necessary to recoil, but it is necessary to leap, and perhaps one only recoils in order to leap better.
Georges Bataille
Topics: Fear

Naturally, love’s the most distant possibility.
Georges Bataille
Topics: Love

Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things.
Georges Bataille
Topics: Sacrifice

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