SO GOOD QUOTES

Category: BEST OF

  • The former fact also explains the restlessness of those who have nothing to do, and their aimless travelling. What drives them from country to country is the same boredom which at home drives them together into such crowds and heaps it is funny to see.

    —Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms (Classics)

  • “The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still.”

    —Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark

  • “Despondency comes from anger and desire—anger at what we have, and desire for what we don’t have.”

    —Evagrius of Ponticus

  • We can classify here also the constant tendency to consider most attractive those pursuits that take one far from home or from one’s city. Here again we find the last daughter of acedia, instability, who thinks that by changing where one is, one can change who one is.

    The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Times
    Jean-Charles Nault

  • So even though he did not accomplish anything noble, and only because he bore his despondency nobly, he obtained the same end as the patriarch [Abraham] who did accomplish such acts of virtue.

    —Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia

  • Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

    —Emil Cioran

  • Sadness (lupe) appears to be a state of soul which, beside the simple meaning of the word, involves discouragement, debility, psychic heaviness and sorrow, dejection, distress, oppression, and depression most often accompanied by anxiety and even with anguish.

    This condition can have many causes, but it always involves a pathological reaction of the soul’s irascible (thumos) and/or despairing faculty (epithumia), and as such is essentially tied to concupiscence or anger. ‘Sadness,’ Evagrius tells us, ‘tends to come up at times because of the deprivation of one’s desires (steresis ton epithumion). On other occasions, it accompanies anger. But it can also be a result of the direct action of demons on the soul, or it may even arise for no apparent reason.

    First Cause—The Frustration of Desires

    Evagrius tells us ‘Sadness is formed from an unsatisfied carnal desire.’ St. John Cassian likewise notes that sadness ‘sometimes results when we see ourselves deceived with regard to some hope,’ and that one of its chief kinds follows from ‘a desire that has been thwarted.’ In that ‘every desire is tied to a passion,’ every passion is prone to produce sadness. According to Evagrius: ‘whoever loves the world will often be sad.’

    Mental Disorders & Spiritual Healing: Teachings from the Early Christian East
    Jean-Claude Larchet

  • Repeat frequently: Thy will be done, O Lord!

    Letters of Elder Macarius of Optina

  • “You can’t rescue a brother who needs to save himself.”

    —Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

  • The greed of Self-Love, say holy counselors, will often spawn Envy. As one who is discontented looks around and sees people blessed with better lives, fewer problems, greater gifts, more secure families and friendships, envy can occur. Much discontent produces envy even of the unborn, because they are free of pain, as the Preacher showed when he said, Rather than the living, I envy the dead; better than both of these is one who has not been born to have to see evil (Ecc. 4:2,3). Another said about his life: Cursed be the day when I was born. Cursed be the man who brought the news, because he did not kill me, so that my mother might have been my grave…. Instead, I came out of the womb to see labor and sorrow (Jer. 20:14-18). For anyone gripped by dissatisfaction and pain, and hatred of the way life has gone, here’s a prayer that can lift a soul up from that discontent, if one faithfully stays with it.

    Lord Jesus Christ, forgive me and deliver me from hating life.

    —Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity