Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.
Meaning of the quote
The quote suggests that true happiness and pleasure often come with a darker side or a hidden cost. Just like a worm in a fruit, the pain or "poison" that comes with something can actually make the pleasure or "delightful happiness" more intense and meaningful. In other words, the difficult or unpleasant aspects of life can paradoxically enhance the good things we experience.
About Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille was a renowned French philosopher and intellectual who explored fascinating topics like eroticism, mysticism, and the transgressive. His influential work spanned various disciplines, leaving a lasting impact on schools of thought like poststructuralism.
More quotes from 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.
French intellectual and literary figure
Naturally, love’s the most distant possibility.
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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.
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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.
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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.
French intellectual and literary figure
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.
French intellectual and literary figure
Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.
French intellectual and literary figure
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.
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Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things.
French intellectual and literary figure
Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.
French intellectual and literary figure
I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.
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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.
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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.
French intellectual and literary figure
The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility.
French intellectual and literary figure