SO GOOD QUOTES

Category: SUFFERING

  • Just as when you hear a physician explaining various diseases, you understand the misery of the human frame by learning the number and the kind of sufferings it is liable to, so when you peruse the laws and read there the strange variety of crimes in marriage to which their penalties are attached, you will have a pretty accurate idea of its properties; for the law does not provide remedies for evils which do not exist, any more than a physician has a treatment for diseases which are never known.

    —St. Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity, Chap. 3

  • Sickness, in my experience, is often unbearably boring. Days full of so much nothing that they all blur together, weeks spent in bed, bad TV shows you don’t remember, stretches of strange, stretchy time that feel like months and minutes at once, staring at the ceiling and listening to your upstairs neighbors fuck, quiet betrayals, unanswered texts, meetings missed with little fanfare, closing your eyes and waiting for a real punishment that never seems to arrive. A year defined by things you forgot to do. No conflict, just lowered expectations.

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    rayne fisher-quann

  • And you, therefore, if you stay in your house, if you are held fast in your bed, do not think that you are living an unproductive life.

    For you are enduring something more grievous than what you have suffered at the hands of public torturers, by whom you have been dragged, savagely attacked, stretched to the utmost-and that is this extreme infirmity of yours, which is like having a public torturer continually residing in your house. But do not therefore either desire your end or neglect your health; for that is not safe. Therefore Paul heartily advises Timothy to take the greatest care of himself. But about your illness—it’s enough to say these things.

    —Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia

  • Do not, therefore, imagine that the struggle now set before you is small; for dealing with bodily illness is more exalted a contest than all the things that you have endured, as I have said.

    —Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia

  • Cease, therefore, your crying, and stop torturing yourself with grief. And do not look only upon the torments that have been afflicting you ceaselessly one after another, but also consider the swiftness with which you have been freed from them, and the ineffable reward and recompense that they bring.

    —Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia

  • “I spent these past two months no better than dead—yea, even worse than dead. I was surviving just enough to perceive the terrible things encircling me everywhere. All was night to me—the day, the dawn, the height of noonday—and I spent the whole time nailed to my bed.”

    —Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia

  • In order that you may learn, from another angle, what the gain of sufferings is, even if one does not suffer for God—and no one would consider this to be an exaggeration—if one suffers and bears it nobly, and with meekness glorifies God for everything, he will be rewarded. Even Job did not know that he suffered those things for God—and indeed, this is why he was crowned, because he endured them nobly, not knowing the reason for his sufferings.

    —Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia

  • So then, expect great rewards for such torture-many prizes; recompense beyond description; brilliant, abundantly blossoming crowns for such agony. For it is not only for the good one does, but also for the evil one suffers, that one obtains many rewards and great prizes.

    —Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia

  • For even the sun and the air seem to be oppressive to those who are suffering from these things, and midday seems to be as darkest night.

    —Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia

  • When I was twenty-eight, I had thyroid cancer. It was cured. But for the rest of my life, that sense of invulnerability was gone.”

    —Susan Cain, Bittersweet