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.
Georges BatailleRead
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.
Interpretation
Both neurotics and saints experience similar inner struggles, but their responses are different.
This quote by Georges Bataille suggests that individuals who suffer psychologically (neurotics) and those who are spiritually evolved (saints) share a common human experience of pain and struggle. However, while the neurotic may react to this anguish with despair and withdrawal, the saint transforms their suffering into acts of giving and compassion. The quote highlights the paradox of the human condition and the different ways individuals can respond to their suffering.
In practice
In a discussion about mental health and spirituality during a seminar.
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.
I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.
What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners? – A violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?
It is clear that the world is purely parodic, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.
I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acceptation of a way of life wherein each moment has meaning only in relation to another or others that will follow it.
Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.
Our collective future depends on opening channels of compassion, acceptance, and understanding of others.
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.
People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.
Coincidences are spiritual puns.
Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
It's easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.
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