Category: SUFFERING & TRIBULATION

  • “I always advise my friends: just go for a walk for an hour and come back and see how you feel then. I think we’re meant to be outdoors.”

    — Björk

  • “The path to God is a daily cross. No one has ascended to heaven by way of ease—we know where the easy way leads.”

    —St. Isaac the Syrian

  • “It is equally difficult to preserve one’s soul from despair in hard times, and to prevent it from becoming arrogant in prosperous circumstances.”

    —St. Basil the Great, On Social Justice

  • Earthly life consists of nothing but serving others, and that, in fact, there is no life other than that of serving and patiently bearing sorrow and pain.

    —Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica, Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives

  • “Ordinarily we experience no pain when the soul is sick, yet on the contrary when the body is troubled we use every means possible to relieve that trouble. For this very reason God afflicts the body because of the sins of the soul, in order to restore health to man’s most noble aspect by making use of the least noble affliction.”

    —St. John Chrysostom

  • “At a time of affliction, expect a provocation to sensual pleasure; for because it relieves the affliction it is readily welcomed.”

    —St. Mark the Ascetic

  • “We suffer more often in our imagination than in reality.”

    —Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

  • In hindsight, it’s incredible how trivial some of it seems. At the time, though, it was the perfect storm. I include wording like “impossible situation,” which was reflective of my thinking at the time, not objective reality.

    Tim Ferriss on How He Survived Suicidal Depression and His Tools for Warding Off the Darkness

  • “It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

    —Wendell Berry, “Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms”

  • “When people have these kind of problems, it’s time to stop asking what’s wrong with them and time to start asking what happened to them.”

    — Dr. Robert Anda