Love. The less the natural man succeeds in attaining happiness, the more he finds an outlet for [his longing for it] in prayer.
—Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity
Category: DESPONDENCY
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The sickness of sadness, irrational sadness, or unreasonable sadness, or a sadness that takes control over our life—it weakens the faith. I have to be careful not to let sadness rule over me, anger to rule over me.
—Fr. Mina Dimitri -
They can be miserable if they allow fatigue into their life.
—Fr. Mina Dimitri -
For if you do this the Scripture will expel your despondency and engender pleasure, extirpate vice and make virtue take root, and in the tumult of life it will save you from suffering like those who are tossed by troubled waves.
Saint John Chrysostom, On the Vanity of Riches
HOMILY ONE
On Eutropios the eunuch, patrician, and consul -
She hates her friends when they try to soften her grief; she will not take food, she wastes away, and in her soul’s deep dejection has a strong longing only for her death, a longing which often lasts till it comes.
—St. Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity, Chap. 3 -
There are those who are called the slothful in the book of Wisdom, who strew their path with thorns, who consider harmful to the soul a zeal for deeds in keeping with the commandments of God, the demurrers against the apostolic injunctions, who do not eat their own bread with dignity, but, fawning on others, make idleness the art of life. Then, there are the dreamers who consider the deceits of dreams more trustworthy than the teachings of the Gospels, calling fantasies revelations. Apart from these, there are those who stay in their own houses, and still others who consider being unsociable and brutish a virtue without recognizing the command to love and without knowing the fruit of long-suffering and humility.
James Stuart Bell, ed., Ancient Faith Study Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bibles, 2019), 752.
They stay in their homes and “isolate from others” and their community. One of the most dangerous things people do is isolate themselves from the church community. All of this is a big thorn that you are putting in your life that makes you lazy, that makes you not put effort, and makes you isolated, and makes the devil easy to control you and change you.
—Fr. Mina Dimitri, inspired by Gregory of Nyssa’s On Virginity, Chap. 23
They take from people (by flattery, by anger, by complaining, by manipulation). Sometimes they’re lazy, dependent fully on their family, yet they’re still yelling and disrespecting their own family.
—Fr. Mina Dimitri -
The things I desire are still an obstacle to my flourishing, but I don’t think that’s going anywhere — I’m too optimistic about my cruel optimism.
cruel optimism new year
rayne fisher-quann -
“How are you?”
“Good–”
“Give it time…”—Eugene Thacker, Infinite Resignation: On Pessimism
SO GOOD QUOTES 