Category: BEST OF

  • 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

  • “It seems we don’t know how to love the ones we love until they disappear from our lives.”

    —Joshua Fields Millburn, Everything That Remains: A Memoir by The Minimalists

  • You can’t resent other people because you let yourself down. But you can try.

    —John Tottenham

  • We all have value. 

    We all contribute. We all give back—if not through paid work, then as part of the human ecosystem. 

    “All Parasites Have Value:” Why Valuing Those Who Don’t Work is Key to More Sustainable Work Practices for Those Who Do

  • “Could I too choose to make the pain stop by staying busy? Eventually, the action was over and everyone had to go home. There is always a point when the doing ends, and then we are faced with the deafening and horrendous silence that is our thoughts.”

    —Joe Watson Jr., The End of Despair

  • What is this whole world, with all its continents, its past, present, and future? What does it amount to? Nothing! I resonate with a statement from one scholar who once said: “When I was a child I saw myself in comparison to the world as a small speck of sand on an endless beach of an endless ocean.” So what if someone lives in any given city within a specific country, which is part of a specific continent, which in turn is a small part of planet Earth, itself just one of innumerable planets? What would that mean? It is nothing. What does this person turn out to be? He says: “When I was a child, I saw myself as a small speck of sand on an endless beach of an endless ocean, but now I know that I am the endless ocean and the whole world is a small speck of sand on my beach.” 

    One who sits to think of the world finds that it is frivolous. If you asked him, “What is the world?” he would say, “A small speck of sand on my beach.” And if you asked, “What is your endless beach?” he would reply, “This is the beach leading to eternity.” If you see yourself as the image and likeness of God, then what does this world amount to? With all its noise, struggles, desires, and status, what does the world amount to? Nothing. This is a person’s valuation of the world.


    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Monastic Treasures for All of Us