“The antidote, then, isn’t to simply abstain from everything. Abstinence alone leaves a void. Rather, we must walk toward the activities that provide purpose in our daily lives—creativity, community, contribution—to walk away from our vices.”
Crisis of Meaning
The Minimalists
Category: TEMPERANCE
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“What we’re often really craving is not the thing that we desire, but the reprieve we feel once we have relieved ourselves from the yearning of desire.”
—Kass Sarll -
How is it possible for drunkenness to be such a worthwhile drug experience that I’d do a thousand times? Even if it was free, physiologically healthy and zero-calorie, the drug itself still represents a very questionable tradeoff in terms of mental faculties. For a few hours, you gain some relief from rumination and stress, and it’s easier to laugh and open up. But you lose a significant degree of what are probably the best human capacities: judgment, self-control, intelligence, basic awareness, and kindness.
—David Cain, Goodbye Booze, For Now
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“But remember this, whenever you begin to consider whether you may safely take one draught more, it is then high time to give over : let that be accounted a sign late enough to break off; for every reason to doubt is a sufficient reason to part the company.”
—Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667), On Christian Sobriety – Rules for obtaining temperance. -
For wine leads to more wine. It does not satisfy a need, but produces an inexorable need for another drink, making those who are drunk thirsty and arousing in them an even-greater appetite for more. But even though they imagine that they have an insatiable desire for drink, they experience or rather deliberately choose something quite the opposite of this. For by continual self-indulgence they dull their senses. Just as too much light blinds the eyes, and those buffeted by loud noises are made completely deaf by the excessive beating that their ears suffer, so too drunkards fail to notice that they destroy whatever pleasure they experience by their excessive love of pleasure. They find the wine tasteless and watery even if it is undiluted. And when in its place they drink fresh wine, they find it warm, even if it is completely unmixed, even if it is ice-cold, and it cannot quench that internal fire that burns within them from an excessive amount of wine.
—St. Basil the Great, On Fasting and Feasts: St. Basil the Great, Homily Against Drunkards -
56. When the body is urged by the senses to indulge its own desires and pleasures, the corrupted intellect readily succumbs and assents to its impassioned fantasies and impulses. But the regenerated intellect exercises self-control and withholds itself from them. Moreover, as a true philosopher it studies how to rectify such impulses.
—St. Maximos the Confessor, Four Hundred Texts on Love
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164. A man knows God and is known by Him in so far as he makes every effort not to be separated from God; and he will succeed in this if he is good in every way and refrains from all sensual pleasure, not because he lacks the means to indulge such pleasure, but because of his own determination and self-control.
Anthony the Great: On the Character of Men and on the Virtuous Life: One Hundred and Seventy Texts
Philokalia -
My child, it often happens that a man seeks ardently after something he desires and then when he has attained it he begins to think that it is not at all desirable; for affections do not remain fixed on the same thing, but rather flit from one to another. It is no very small matter, therefore, for a man to forsake himself even in things that are very small.
A man’s true progress consists in denying himself, and the man who has denied himself is truly free and secure.
—Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ
SO GOOD QUOTES 