Georges Bataille Quotes

It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.

We ape, we mimic, we mock. We act.

I'm not acting, but I am acting.

Life is a masquerade.

From a distance it is something; and nearby it is nothing.

Do not mistake me for my mask. You see light dappling on the water and forget the deep, cold dark beneath.

The world being illusive, one must be deluded in some way if one is to triumph in it.

Once you look past the hype, actors are nothing more than fugitives from reality who specialize in contradiction: we are both children and hardened adults—wide-eyed pupils and jaded working stiffs.

Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things.

Things are not what they appear to be: nor are they otherwise.

In the essence of truth lies deceit.

Glamour is translucent — not transparent, not opaque. It invites us into the world but it doesn’t give us a completely clear picture.

Beware the things of this world that can mean everything or nothing.

If we agree that the world is not what it seems, then we have an important question: What shall we do about it?

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate: Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass Hang all the furniture above the grass, And how delightful when a fall of snow Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so As to make chair and bed exactly stand Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!

Actors, said Granny, witheringly. As if the world weren't full of enough history without inventing more.

Men live in a fantasy world. I know this because I am one, and I actually receive my mail there

The world isn't what you think it is.

Our lives are just spectacles. We are like dolls, in a sense, to be observed and played with - often with cruel and deceitful intentions - in an unreal world.

As in Rome there is, apart from the Romans, a population of statues, so apart from this real world there is a world of illusion, almost more potent, in which most men live.

There is order in the universe, even though it looks like chaos. We separate the world into categories: this is good and this is bad. But life is set up to trick us. It's a series of illusions we invest in. And ultimately those investments don't serve our understanding, because physicality is always going to let you down, because physicality doesn't last.

nothing is more like truth than a lie, don't you find?

We live in imaginary, virtual worlds created by corporations that profit from our deception.

Every character, no matter who you play, at times is pretending to be somebody else. People have a public face and a private face.

Yet is beauty the pleasing trickery that cheateth half the world.