Your unceasing working over of your obsessions will end up transforming you into a pathetic wreck, consumed by anguish and devastated by apathy.
Michel Houellebecq’s manifesto: Rester vivant (To Stay Alive)
Category: KNOWLEDGE & SELF-KNOWLEDGE
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“Sad are only those who understand.”
— Arab Proverb (via fyp-philosophy) -
We must not seek to know God, or anything else from or about God. We must rather humble ourselves. God will then come to us and give us that which we desire. If you don’t humbly acknowledge your spiritual poverty, you won’t be able to ask God to give you the treasures of His grace. But through humility and prayer, God pours out the riches of His knowledge, granting us communion in His life. But rather than being filled with knowledge of God, we normally live with a void at the center of our existence. There is a hole in our heart, into which crawl all the cares and worries of life. We work ourselves to exhaustion in pursuit of success and happiness. We struggle to improve our position in society, to attend the right schools, and move in the right kind of circles. But the void within us is always on the increase. Nothing in the world can fill it, because it can only be filled with God. But we mustn’t despair, because despair itself is a sign of pride, and thus will take us even further away from the humble God. Avoid that road. Resist temptation, struggle, take up your cross, and God will come and find you, wherever you are.
—Elder Aimilanos of Simonopetra -
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 -
“He [Pope Kyrillos VI] also really emphasized reading as a part of prayer. Reading is intellect to prayer.”
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we want to keep ourselves from putting blame for our misfortune on anybody else, no matter how obviously it may appear to be the fault of another person. Misfortune is meant to give us a bigger purpose than looking for someone to blame. It is to draw our attention to God and our need for God to bring us to repentance.
—Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity
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When looking at our personal circumstances, then, we never measure them by someone else’s circumstances. The teaching of our holy counselors is: Do not compare yourself to others in anything (Barsanuphius). Just compare your performance (your response to God’s calling and purpose for you, they say, with the gifts you have been given to enable you to obey that calling. Then instead of regretting that we do not have the good fortune some others have, our only regrets are for occasions when we’ve failed to use the gifts God has given us to fulfill the blessed purpose for which he has called us.
We are all called to overcome different obstacles. You are called that you should inherit a blessing (I Pet. 3:9), says the Bible. Some people are called to overcome psychological problems, some physical illnesses, some persecution, some slavery, some injustices of all kinds, some martyrdom.
—Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity
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You can’t resent other people because you let yourself down. But you can try.
—John Tottenham
SO GOOD QUOTES 