Category: DESPONDENCY

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

    —John Tottenham

  • “You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.”
    ―Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  • “They don’t remember something happening, but remember something not happening. They’ve missed out, and now they’re obsessed with the past that they did not live that does not exist for them.”

    commentary on The Unhappiest Person in the World | Soren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or

  • Though you may be dead for a little while, He will raise you to life again.

    —St. Augustine

  • My walk on the cliffs was unfortunately a failure. And yet never had the light been so beautiful, never had the air been so fresh and reinvigorating, never had the green of the meadows been so intense, never had the reflection of the sun on the wavelets of the almost flat ocean been so enchanting; neither, I think, had I ever been so unhappy.

    —Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin: A Novel

  • From the outside a soul may appear to be healthy, while within, in the depths of consciousness, it may suffer from some hidden sickness. It can be healed from the outside through being pierced by reproof, and from within through the renewal of the intellect. Whoever, then, rejects such reproof, and shamelessly continues to lie on his bed in the sickroom of lethargy, is a fool.

    —Ilias the Presbyter

  • “He was looking for joy and found the Cross. What remedy is there for his sadness? He must rediscover the spirit of poverty. A rich person is someone who expects everything. A poor person is someone for whom everything is a gift. Nothing is owed us, not even our existence. ‘What do you have that you have not received?’ Friendship, happiness, joy are not owed us.”

    —Jean-Yves Leloup, Being Still

  • That it is our duty to perform each task considered as worthy with the utmost enthusiasm is insured by the terrible caveat that performing Godly work in a careless manner curses it. But worry, or the many worries that trouble the heart and give it no peace, is a disease of fallen man, who under took to decide his own fate and who is tossed and turned on all sides. Worry disturbs our thoughts and does not even allow us to focus on the task at hand. I suggest, therefore, that you look into this and, if you find that such a worry occasionally overwhelms you, try to drive it out and do not give it any ground. Have enthusiasm for your work and, performing it with utmost care, expect success from God, dedicating the task itself to Him, no matter how small it is, and you will get rid of worry.

    Do this, and everyday occupations and tasks will not distract you from God.

    May the Lord help you!

    —St. Theophan the Recluse

  • Woe to our times: we now depart from the narrow and sorrowful path leading to eternal life and we seek a happy and peaceful path. But the merciful Lord leads many people from this path, against their will, and places them on the sorrowful one. Through unwanted sorrows and illnesses we draw closer to the Lord, for they humble us by constraint, and humility, when we acquire it, can save us even without works, according to St. Isaac the Syrian.

    —St. Macarius of Optina