“Remember always: if your way of life is hard and sorrowful, it is correct; but if you live in comfort, wealth and honour, and still more, in carnal pleasures, you are on the road to perdition. It is quite impossible to attain serenity of mind without enduring many sorrows and depression and for many years.”
—Father Ilian of Mount Athos
Category: AVARICE & ALMSGIVING & MINIMALISM
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As the British philosopher Bertrand Russell put it in The Conquest of Happiness (1930):
A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase.
In 1918, Russell spent four and a half months in Brixton prison for ‘pacifist propaganda’, but found the bare conditions congenial and conducive to creativity:
I found prison in many ways quite agreeable … I had no engagements, no difficult decisions to make, no fear of callers, no interruptions to my work. I read enormously; I wrote a book, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy … and began the work for Analysis of Mind … One time, when I was reading Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, I laughed so loud that the warder came round to stop me, saying I must remember that prison was a place of punishment.
Boredom is but a window to a sunny day beyond the gloom -
“He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory -
Therefore despise the swellings and the diseases of a disordered life and a proud vanity; be troubled for no outward thing beyond its merit, enjoy the present temperately, and you cannot choose but be pleased to see that you have so little share in the follies and miseries of the intemperate world.
—Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667)
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If men did but know what felicity dwells in the cottage of a virtuous poor man, how sound his sleeps, how quiet his breast, how composed his mind, how free from care, how easy his provision, how healthful his morning, how sober his night, how moist his mouth, how joyful his heart, they would never admire the noises and the diseases, the throng of passions, and the violence of unnatural appetites, that fill the houses of the luxurious and the heart of the ambitious.
—Rev. Jeremy Taylor, The House of Feasting .The Whole Works of the Rt. Rev. Jeremy Taylor, Volume 1 -
“That’s kind of their first go-to question, and I just tell them: this is not a project about hygiene. I wash it as needed. I come to work clean. Lots of people wear uniforms and they are not assumed to be dirty. But the minute that there is no uniform policy and somebody voluntarily chooses to wear the same thing everyday, suddenly that’s not socially acceptable, and I think that element of our culture is worth thinking about.”
—Julia Mooney, Here’s why a New Jersey middle school teacher is wearing the same dress for 100 days -
Remember that in life you ought to behave as at a banquet. Suppose that something is carried round and is opposite to you. Stretch out your hand and take a portion with decency. Suppose that it passes by you. Do not detain it. Suppose that it is not yet come to you. Do not send your desire forward to it, but wait till it is opposite to you. Do so with respect to children, so with respect to a wife, so with respect to magisterial offices, so with respect to wealth, and you will be some time a worthy partner of the banquets of the gods. But if you take none of the things which are set before you, and even despise them, then you will be not only a fellow-banqueter with the gods, but also a partner with them in power.
—Epictetus, Enchiridion
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Some people ask if help is needed. And others just help. The former act as good people, and the latter are likened to Christ.
—Monk Simeon of Mt. Athos -
We gain nothing, therefore, by our decision to renounce earthly things if we do not abide by it, but continue to be attracted by such things and allow ourselves to keep thinking about them. By constantly looking back like Lot’s wife towards what we have renounced, we make clear our attachment, to it. For she looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt, remaining to this day an example to the disobedient (cf. Gen. 19:26). She symbolizes the force of habit, which draws us back again after we have tried to make a definitive act of renunciation.
—St. Neilos The Ascetic
Philokalia
SO GOOD QUOTES 