Try to be more attentive to yourself instead of judging the actions, behavior, and attitude of others towards you; if you do not see love in them, it is because you yourself have no love within you.”
—Elder Leo of Optina
Category: LONELINESS & SOLITUDE
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And in your heart you will now be free at last and utterly alone. It is only in this aloneness, this utter solitude, that dependence and desire will die, and the capacity to love is born. For one no longer sees others as means to satisfy one’s addiction.
―Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love -
We all enter the Infinite Scroll shouting, hoping to find love.
Bimbo Ubermensch
The Ocean -
Our friendship was not entirely pure, although it’s worth acknowledging that few friendships are truly pure. Most friendships, to varying degrees, are based on proximity and convenience.
Bimbo Ubermensch
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It’s impossible to know someone for too long and too well without inevitably despising them. It’s better to space out your meetings with your friends and loved ones so you don’t get to know them too well and end up hating them.
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If I have the feeling that I am applying boundaries in an improper way, I ought to open the doors once again, because boundaries preserve relationships, and not destroy them.
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Build Boundaries
Seldom set foot in your neighbor’s house,
Lest he become weary of you and hate you.
Proverbs 25:17 (NKJV)
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The moderate person has many relationships, and does not depend on a single person to fulfill all of his needs of love and friendship. If this person’s circumstances change, he may become troubled, because he depends on this [one] person completely. The more relationships a person has, the more accepting he becomes of the boundaries of others. Therefore, we have to have many mature and sound relationships.
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Build Boundaries
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The person who lives in isolation from others and refrains from helping others, has a problem with boundaries, because he shuts his doors to good things.
Nevertheless, we pray in the Divine Liturgy, “He made us unto Himself an assembled people, and sanctified us.”…
The avoiders do not allow [both] the good and the bad from entering, even though there may be a risk that God may be left outside the heart, and he does not allow Him to come in: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me.” (Rev 3:20)
“Do not consent in your thoughts, nor characterize in your words, any person as evil. The Lord has loosened us from the bondage of the devil, so that we should not bind ourselves again nor give our souls up to slavery by our ill opinion.”
St. Macarius
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Build Boundaries
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“If he’d learned one thing while he’d been away, it was that loneliness is the most taboo subject in the world. Forget sex or politics or religion. Or even failure. Loneliness is what clears out a room.”
— Douglas Coupland, Miss Wyoming
Pain, for instance. Everyone has it, most people want to talk about it, yet no one really wants to hear about it. Talking about one’s pain makes one boring and embarrassing. It imposes on the sympathy and energy of others.
—Noreen Masud, There is nothing so deep as the gleaming surface of the aphorism
SO GOOD QUOTES 