Category: DESPONDENCY

  • But God does not listen to such entreaty; rather, instead of consolation he sends boredom, and instead of light, darkness. Right there, halfway along our road, we don’t know whether we are going backwards or forwards.

    Letters from the Desert
    by Carlo Carretto

  • It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere.

    —Sylvia Plath

  • Two years ago we were both unhappy where we were and demanded a change. Two years later, we feel the same. Something is wrong. Something is making us miserable. Only now I’m starting to realize that it’s not our situation, not the job or the commute or living back home, it’s our inability to stomach the misery that is inherent in life.

    Lauren Martin, Enduring Bad Days: Using Sport Mentality To Combat The Work Week

  • 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

  • God forms character in obscurity. Right now you might feel forgotten. Do not despise the hidden season. Hidden years are not wasted years.

    —Fr. Paul Girguis

  • 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 more gifted a man is, the less progress he makes on the spiritual level. Talent is an obstacle to the inner life.

    —Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

  • “Beware of passionate attachments to the world. Although they deceive you with peace and comfort, they are so fleeting that you do not notice how you are deprived of them, and in their place come sorrow, longing, despondency, and no comfort whatsoever.”

    —St. Leonid of Optina