QuoteProject
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.
Georges Bataille
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote reflects on the heavy burden of omnipotence and the pain of understanding the existence of evil.

Georges Bataille's quote delves into the profound discomfort of divinity, suggesting that embodying God would entail a painful awareness of all existence, including the most horrific aspects of reality. It raises questions about the nature of evil and the responsibilities that come with absolute power, implying that true divinity involves suffering through the understanding of the world's darkest truths.

Themes

GodPainEvilPhilosophySuffering

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in a philosophical debate about the nature of divinity and evil.

More from Georges Bataille

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.
Georges BatailleRead
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
I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.
Georges BatailleRead
What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners? – A violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?
Georges BatailleRead
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.
Georges BatailleRead
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.
Georges BatailleRead

Similar quotes

No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses.
Vladimir LeninRead
I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.
Clarence DarrowRead
Edible, adj.: Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
Ambrose BierceRead
What was Aristotle’s life?’ Well, the answer lay in a single sentence: ‘He was born, he thought, he died.’ And all the rest is pure anecdote.
Martin HeideggerRead
The fact is, the most painful and tragic lesson of the 20th century was that regimes based on racial superiority and religious hatred can't be trusted to keep their word to the international community.
Michael BloombergRead
Labour is ... not the only source of material wealth, i.e, of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, Labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.
Karl MarxRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.