Georges Bataille Quotes

I think generally I'm kind of interested in subjective experience, what goes on inside someone's head, that being all they really know of the world.

It is in man's heart that the life of nature's spectacle exists; to see it, one must feel it.

There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define; we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.

'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

I feel like we want to compartmentalise things and say, 'Well, that's emotional, artistic and subjective, while this is intellectual, objective and measured.' I have difficulty thinking that's the way we experience things.

It seems to me a worthy goal: try to create a representation of consciousness that's durable and truthful, i.e., that accounts, somewhat, for all the strange, tiny, hard-to-articulate, instantaneous, unwilled things that actually go on in our minds in the course of a given day, or even a given moment.

Science is empirical, all about physical senses that tell us about the world. But physical senses are not the only senses we have. Nobody has ever seen a thought. Nobody has ever seen a feeling. And yet thoughts and feelings are where we live our lives most immediately, and science cannot connect with that.

Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.

The singular point of beautiful objects, and people, is that they are experienced not as parts, or ratios between cheekbones and chin, but as wholes. The experience of beauty is a perception, but it is one that mixes up various other sensations and makes them converge in a particular way.

That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.

We do not merely perceive objects and hold thoughts in our minds: all our perceptions and thought processes are felt. All have a distinctive component that announces an unequivocal link between images and the existence of life in our organism.

Only when inspired to go beyond consciousness by some extraordinary insight does beauty manifest unexpectedly.

Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.

I don't talk about consciousness. I talk about interiority.

In my head there are several windows, that I do know, but perhaps it is always the same one, open variously on the parading universe.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

We all know what we know. We experience with our minds and breath.

The arts objectify subjective reality, and subjectify outward experience of nature. Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is corruption of feeling.

Dreams and waking life are both the same kinds of things. The difference is that dreaming is perceiving free of external constraints, whereas perceiving otherwise is dreaming true. Meaning what you dream about actually happens.

The truth is that art does not teach; it makes you feel, and any teaching that may arise from the feeling is an extra, and must not be stressed too much. In the modern world, and in Canada as much as anywhere, we are obsessed with the notion that to think is the highest achievement of mankind, but we neglect the fact that thought untouched by feeling is thin, delusive, treacherous stuff.

Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.

Without emotion there is no beauty

All our interior world is reality, and that, perhaps, more so than our apparent world.

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity.