Category: SUFFERING & TRIBULATION

  • Do not consider great the missionary to Africa or the significant inventor. Great is the little person who forbears the madness, the injustice, the persecution, the pain of his neighbor and of his own life.

    —Monk Moses the Athonite

  • Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.

    —Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

  • In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear. For to him who does know, children can sometimes seem like innocent delinquents, sentenced not to death but to life, who have not yet discovered what their punishment will consist of.

    —Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

  • But you must divide yourself, you must hope by day and sorrow by night, or sorrow by day and hope by night.

    Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
    Søren Kierkegaard

  • for the eloquence of sorrow is infinite and infinitely inventive.

    Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
    Søren Kierkegaard

  • Yesterday I loved, Today I suffer, Tomorrow I die.

    Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
    Søren Kierkegaard

  • I seem destined to suffer every possible mood, to gain experience in all directions.

    Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
    Søren Kierkegaard

  • There is not much to be gained in this world: privation and suffering fill it, and for those who have avoided these, boredom lurks at every corner.

    —Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life’

    In the Presence of Schopenhauer
    Michel Houellebecq

  • From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.

    Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

    The Screwtape Letters
     C. S. Lewis

  • More than once, I have managed to leave my room, for if I had stayed there I could not be sure of being able to resist some sudden resolution. The street is more reassuring, you think less about yourself there,

    The Trouble With Being Born
    Emil Cioran