Thread by @0_shoonyata_, Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and [...]

Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex, which causes each one to wish above all things the embraces of the other and by common desire to carry out all of +

love's precepts in the other's embrace.
----------Andreas Capellanus, De arte honeste amandi.

God knows I never sought anything in you except yourself; I wanted simply you, nothing of yours. I looked for no marriage-bond, no marriage portion, and it was not my own pleasures and wishes I sought to gratify, as you well know, but yours.+

The name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding, but sweeter for me will always be the word mistress, or, if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore.
-----Heloise, expressing her warm love for Abelard.

La Rochefoucauld has a cynical maxim, that there is no woman whose merit survives her beauty.

Man is an animal who stands abashed in front of death or sexual union.
-- Georges Bataille.

A dead body cannot be called nothing at all, but that object, that corpse, is stamped straight off with the sign "nothing at all". This object, then, is less than nothing and worse than nothing.
--- Georges Bataille.

After the living man the dead body is nothing at all; similarly nothing tangible or objective brings on our feeling of nausea; what we experience is a kind of void, a sinking sensation.
-- Georges Bataille.

Repugnance and horror are the mainsprings of my desire, that such desire is only aroused as long as its object causes a chasm no less deep than death to yawn within me, and that this desire originates in its opposite, horror.
-- Georges Bataille.

It takes an iron nerve to perceive the connection between the promise of life implicit in eroticism and the sensuous aspect of death.
-- Georges Bataille.

Sexuality and death are simply the culminating points of the holiday, nature celebrates, with the inexhaustible multitude of living beings, both of them signifying the boundless wastage of nature's resources ++

as opposed to the urge to live on characteristic of every living creature.
-- Georges Bataille.

The transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it.
- Georges Bataille.

When a negative emotion has the upper hand we must obey the taboo. When a positive emotion is in the ascendent we violate it.
- Georges Bataille.

Often the transgression of a taboo is no less subject to rules than the taboo itself.
- Georges Bataille.

The greatest anguish, the anguish in the face of death, is what men desire in order to transcend it beyond death and ruination.
-- Georges Bataille.

Underlying eroticism is the feeling of something bursting, of the violence accompanying an explosion.
-- Georges Bataille.

Objectively, making love is a question of reproduction. Hence, following our reasoning, it is growth, but not our growth. Neither sexual activity nor scissiparity provide for the growth of the being itself engaged on reproduction whether it copulates or more simply divides. ++

Reproduction brings about an impersonal growth.
-- Georges Bataille.

"Death is really the opposite process to the process ending in birth, yet these opposite processes can be reconciled. "
-- Georges Bataille.

Asexual reproduction is death's ultimate truth; death proclaims the fundamental discontinuity of beings (and of existence itself). The discontinuous being alone dies, and death lays bare the falsehood of discontinuity.
-- Georges Bataille.

Mortal anguish does not necessarily make for sensual pleasure, but that pleasure is more deeply felt during mortal anguish.
-- Georges Bataille.

Fear of dying makes us catch our breath and in the same way we suffocate at the moment of crisis.
-- Georges Bataille.

The urge is first of all a natural one but it cannot be given free rein without barriers being tom down,so much so that the natural urge and the demolished obstacles are confused in the mind.The natural urge means a barrier destroyed.The barrier destroyed means the natural urge.+

Christian theology identifies the moral degradation following the sins of the flesh with death. Inevitably linked with the moment of climax there is a minor rupture suggestive of death; and conversely the idea of death may play a part in setting sensuality in motion.

But deep within the significant break there dwells a boundless violence.++

A taste for con-stant change is certainly neurotic, and certainly can only lead to frustration after frustration. Habit, on the other hand, is able to deepen the experiences that impatience scorns to bother with. ++

Enormous unleashing of natural forces seems to be divine, so high does it raise man above the condition to which he has condemned himself of his own accord. Wild cries, wild violence of gesture, wild dances, wild emotions as well, all in the grip of immeasurably convulsive ++

turbulence. The perdition ahead would demand this flight into the regions where all individuality is shed, where the stable elements of human activity disappear and there is no firm foothold any-where to be found. ++

The explosion preceded by anguish takes on a divine significance transcending immediate satisfaction. ++

Desire is a fiery thing; it could burn up a man's wealth to the last penny, it could burn out the life of the man in whom it was aroused. +++

Human life is the Good, and so the acceptance of degradation is a way of spitting upon the good, a way of spitting upon human dignity.
--- Georges Bataille.

Bandelaire : "The unique, supreme pleasure of love lies in the certainty of doing wrong."

Two things are inevitable; we cannot avoid dying nor can we avoid bursting through our barriers, and they are one and the same. ++

We know that death destroys nothing, leaves the totality of existence intact, but we still cannot imagine the continuity of being as a whole beyond our own death, or whatever it is that dies in us. ++

How sweet it is to remain in the grip of the desire to burst out without going the whole way, without taking the final step! How sweet it is to gaze long upon the object of our desire, to live on in our desire, ++

instead of dying by going the whole way, by yielding to the excessive violence of desire! ++

either desire will consume us entirely, or its object will cease to fire us with longing. We can possess it on one condition only, that gradually the the desire it arouses will fade. ++

The greater the anguish the stronger the realisation of exceeding the bounds and the greater the accompanying rush of joy.++

Beauty is desired in order that it may be be-fouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it. ++

Human life cannot follow the movement which draws it towards death without a shudder and without trying to cheat. ++

The man subject to no restraints of any kind falls on his victims with the devouring fury of a vicious hound.
-- Georges Bataille.

De Sade's morality, says Maurice Blanchot "is founded on absolute solitude as a first given fact.

Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding away inside us; we always want to be sure of the uselessness or the ruinousness of our extravagance.++

Moral isolation means that all the brakes are off. The man who admits the value of other people necessarily imposes limits upon himself.
-- Georges Bataille.

Un-fettered freedom opens out into a void where the possibilities match the intensest aspirations at the expense of secondary ones; a sort of heroic cynicism cuts the ties of consideration and tenderness for others without which we cannot bear ourselves in the normal way.
- G.B.

"Apathy", says Maurice BIanchot, "is the spirit of denial applied to the man who has elected to be sovereign.

Insensibility sets the whole being aquiver, says de Sade: 'The soul passes on to a kind of apathy that is metamorphosed into pleasures a thousand times more wonderful than those that their weaknesses have procured them.'

Virtue pleases him because it is weak and he can crush it, and so does vlce, for the disorder it brings even at his own expense gives him satisfaction.
-- Georges Bataille.

Yet love not only conquers; he, she, or it oppresses, teases, and torments. Unfavorably compared by some flattering suitors to certain of his lovelier mortal incarnations, Eros is sometimes also said to suffer from the passion he provokes.
-- Puerilities