We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death.
Interpretation
Embracing diverse perspectives, even from those deemed undesirable, fosters mental growth and prevents stagnation.
This quote by Thomas Bernhard suggests that engaging with individuals who challenge our views or have different characteristics can stimulate our minds and promote intellectual vitality. In contrast, surrounding ourselves solely with those who conform to conventional standards of 'good character' may lead to predictable conversations that dull our curiosity and creativity, ultimately resulting in a stagnant mindset.
In practice
During a panel discussion on creative thinking, you might use this quote to emphasize the importance of listening to unconventional ideas.
In theory we understand people, but in practice we can't put up with them, I thought, deal with them for the most part reluctantly and always treat them from our point of view. We should observe and treat people not from our point of view but from all angles, I thought, associate with them in such a way that we can say we associate with them so to speak in a completely unbiased way, which however isn't possible, since we actually are always biased against everybody.
Only when I am by seawater can I truly breathe, to say nothing of my ability to think.
Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony.
I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying.
Everything is what it is, that's all. If we keep attaching meanings and mysteries to everything we perceive, everything we see that is, and to everything that goes on inside us, we are bound to go crazy sooner or later, I thought.
Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.
What I have experienced, and experienced repeatedly, is the silence of God. For many years, this was a distressing matter for me. I did not consider it an experience, but the absence of an experience.
A thousand policemen directing traffic cannot tell you why you come or where you go.
True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.
Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.
Despotism has so often been established in the name of liberty that experience should warn us to judge parties by their practices rather than their preachings.
Men exist for the sake of one another.
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