…one arrives at asceticism by way of an original intellectuality because one sees into the misery of everything or, more properly, the misery which is existence, or is brought through suffering to the point where it seems a relief to let the whole thing come to a breaking point, breaking with everything, with existence itself – that is, with the desire for existence (asceticism, mortification)…
—Søren Kierkegaard
Category: DESPONDENCY
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That which others hear or read of, I felt and practiced myself; they get their knowledge by books, I mine by melancholising.
—Gaius Marius
via Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton -
Two main reasons may be given of it, why students should be more subject to this malady [melancholy] than others. The one is, they live a sedentary, solitary life, sibi et musis, free from bodily exercise, and those ordinary disports which other men use: and many times if discontent and idleness concur with it, which is too frequent, they are precipitated into this gulf on a sudden: but the common cause is overmuch study; too much learning (as Festus told Paul) hath made thee mad; ’tis that other extreme which effects it.
SUBSECT. XV.– Love of Learning, or overmuch study. With a Digression on the misery of Scholars, and why the Muses are Melancholy.
The Anatomy of Melancholy
Robert Burton -
Tis my sole plague to be alone,
I am a beast, a monster grown,
I will no light nor company,
I find it now my misery.
The scene is turn’d, my joys are gone,
Fear, discontent, and sorrows come.
All my griefs to this are jolly,
Naught so fierce as melancholy.
The Anatomy of Melancholy
Robert Burton -
Therefore I beseech Your Excellency, asking for a great favor that you take great care to amend the infirmity of your body. For despondency can produce physical illness; and when the body is in pain and great weakness, when it is completely neglected, and when it is deprived of doctors, temperate weather, and an abundance of daily necessities, consider how not a little aggravation of distress is caused thereby.
—Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia -
If, therefore, sufferings have great rewards, and despair is the most grievous and most painful of all sufferings, imagine what will be the recompense for it! I will not cease chanting this refrain to you, in order to fulfill now what I promised in the beginning: to draw out from despondency itself the considerations that will give birth to consolation from despondency in you.
—Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia -
But when despondency settled into him, and revealed its power in devouring, exhausting, and consuming him with its teeth, becoming unbearable to him, then what he formerly considered to be the heaviest burden of all [i.e. death], he now considers to be lighter than this [i.e. despondency]. So, too, Jonah, in fleeing from despair, sought refuge in death, saying, “Take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
—Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia -
Listen to what he said then, as he prayed: “It is enough now, O Lord; take my life from me, for I am no better than my fathers.”15 And that most fearsome thing [i.e., death], the height of torture, the chief of evils, the punishment for all sins, this he asks for in prayer, as he wishes to share in a portion of grace. For despondency is much more oppressive than death. In order to flee from the one, he takes refuge in the other.
—Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia
SO GOOD QUOTES 