SO GOOD QUOTES

Category: DESPONDENCY

  • In hindsight, it’s incredible how trivial some of it seems. At the time, though, it was the perfect storm. I include wording like “impossible situation,” which was reflective of my thinking at the time, not objective reality.

    Tim Ferriss on How He Survived Suicidal Depression and His Tools for Warding Off the Darkness

  • If your mood and motivation are low, are telling you not to act, that’s all the more reason to act. Yes, feeling good can lead to action, but action can also lead to feeling good.

    —Brad Stulberg, Mood Follows Action

  • “It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

    —Wendell Berry, “Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms”

  • We are restless people who occasionally find rest, dissatisfied people who occasionally find fulfillment, and disquieted people who occasionally find serenity. We do not naturally default into rest, satisfaction, and quiet, but into their opposite.

    —Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality

  • “Your mood can affect your level of motivation, but never let it affect your discipline. Successful people know what they need to do and do it, regardless of how they feel. Don’t miss out on possible opportunities just because you have chosen to be overpowered by temporary feelings.”

    —@emma_vogt

  • The way I live can look manic or bipolar or narcissistic or self-indulgent or self-abnegating depending on who’s looking. But I’m not depressed or anxious and I’ve never been more productive or happier, because I follow my body and my mind catches up. Or my mind leaps in and my body follows.

    ASK MOLLY | Glory – Maybe you want some for yourself.

  • it’s easy for a depressed person to look like he’s not working when just lying in bed can feel like work for him.

    ASK MOLLY | Hungry!

  • Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.

    — ​Naguib Mahfouz

  • “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

  • 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