SO GOOD QUOTES

Category: SUFFERING

  • When we become unduly distressed at falling ill, we should recognize that our soul is still the slave of bodily desires and so longs for physical health, not wishing to lose the good things of this life and even finding it a great hardship not to be able to enjoy them because of illness. If, however, the soul accepts thankfully the pains of illness, it is clear that it is not far from the realm of dispassion; as a result it even waits joyfully for death as the entry into a life that is more true.

    —St. Diadochus

  • But if we looked to the tribulation through a perspective that is heavenly, eternal, we would see the tribulation as it really is: light and transient. And as our teacher Pope Shenouda III said, “It is bound to end. It is all for the good.”

    —H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Pray

  • FOR all the long years of this present life disappear when you have regard to the eternity of the future glory: and all our sorrows vanish away in the contemplation of that vast bliss, and like smoke melt away, and come to nothing, and like ashes are no more seen.

    John Cassian, Institutes
    CHAPTER XII: That no toil is worthy to be compared with the promised bliss. 

  • ‘Sometimes seeing their fault distresses them more than the thing that disturbs them, for unable to help themselves they are affected by earthly happenings even though these may not be very burdensome.’

    —Teresa of Ávila

  • “Don’t say why me? Say why not me?“

    —Fr. Benjamin Girgis

  • “I’m the last thing tethering you to reality, yet your only way of escaping it.”

    I’m a Short Afternoon Walk and You’re Putting Way Too Much Pressure on Me

  • “A sick man only wants one thing, a healthy man wants 10,000 things.”

    —Confucius

  • “Our circumstances don’t change, but we change.

    The Lord said we *will* have tribulation and that we *may* have peace.”

    —Fr. Daniel Fanous

  • Let us then follow whithersoever He bids us, and let us not too carefully consider whether He commands us to go by a smooth and easy path or by a difficult and rugged one, as in the case of this paralytic.

    Saint John Chrysostom
    On the Two Paralytics in the Gospels
    Homilies on Profitable Subjects

  • In the case of physical illness, even if doctors tell us it is beyond hope, we do all we can to save the body. But on the other hand, when it comes to the spirit and its maladies, for which recovery is never beyond reach, we plunge into despair as if there is nothing we can do. Focusing on your spirit more than your body will save both; focusing on just the body will cause you to lose both.

    ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM ON REPENTANCE &
    DEFEATING DESPAIR
    Letters to Theodore