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Art constitutes a minor free zone outside action, paying for its freedom by giving up the real world. A heavy price!

— Georges Bataille

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More quotes by Georges Bataille

I remain in intolerable non-knowledge, which has no other way out than ecstasy itself.

L’Expérience Intérieure (1943)

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

The difficulty—that contestation must be done in the name of an authority—is resolved this: I contest in the name of contestation what experience itself is.

L’Expérience Intérieure (1943)

All eroticism has a sacramental character.

Erotism: Death and Sensuality (1962)

To choose evil is to choose freedom—“freedom, emancipation from all restraint.”

On Nietzsche (1945)

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All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

George MacDonald The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Georges Bataille (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.