Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison. – 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
The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility. – Georges Bataille
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
All of us have had the experience of a sudden joy that came when nothing in the world had forewarned us of its coming — a joy so thrilling that if it was born of misery we remembered even the misery with tenderness. – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939, translated from Frenc