Was I capable of being happy in solitude? I didn’t think so. Was I capable of being happy in general? That’s the kind of question, I think, that is best not asked.
Serotonin: A Novel by Michel Houellebecq
Category: DESPONDENCY
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God forms character in obscurity. Right now you might feel forgotten. Do not despise the hidden season. Hidden years are not wasted years.
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If only we could go back and do something differently, perhaps we would feel differently right now. But perhaps not. If things unfolded differently, we may be suffering a different hurt, and wish for that to be different.
On moving things forward
Madeleine Dore -
“Poignancy, she told me, is the richest feeling humans experience, one that gives meaning to life—and it happens when you feel happy and sad at the same time. It’s the state you enter when you cry tears of joy—which tend to come during precious moments suffused with their imminent ending. When we tear up at that beloved child splashing in a rain puddle, she explains, we aren’t simply happy: “We’re also appreciating, even if it’s not explicit, that this time of life will end; that good times pass as well as bad ones; that we’re all going to die in the end. I think that being comfortable with this is adaptive. That’s emotional development.”
Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole
Susan Cain -
Psychologically there are two dangers to be guarded against in old age. One of these is undue absorption in the past. It does not do to live in memories, in regrets for the good old days, or in sadness about friends who are dead. One’s thoughts must be directed to the future, and to things about which there is something to be done.
—Bertrand Russell -
“The grass is brown on both sides.”
—Fr. Damian Ference -
Never delay in undertaking any work you have to do, for the first brief delay will lead to a second, more prolonged one, and the second to a third, still longer, and so on. Thus work begins too late and is not done in its proper time, or else is abandoned altogether, as something too burdensome. Having once tasted the pleasure of inaction, you begin to like and prefer it to action. In satisfying this desire, you will little by little form a habit of inaction and laziness, in which the passion for doing nothing will possess you to such an extent that you will cease even to see how incongruous and criminal it is; except perhaps when you weary of this laziness, and are again eager to take up your work. Then you will see with shame how negligent you have been and how many necessary works you have neglected, for the sake of the empty and useless ‘doing what you like’.
Unseen Warfare
Lorenzo Scupoli
SO GOOD QUOTES 