The desire for a woman, or another sordid pleasure, we shall not merely control—rather, we shall turn from it as something transitory, forever doing battle and looking toward the day of judgment. For the larger fear and dread of the torments always destroys pleasure’s smooth allure, and rouses the declining soul.
—Athanasius, The Life of Antony
Category: TRANSCIENCE
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on monasticism
“Fine. Go, say your last goodbyes to your mother and family.” But ah, not one was able to say a last goodbye to his mother and peel himself away from her bosom again! That last goodbye will remain fastened to your mind even until your beard greys. But if you were able to leave the world without a last parting greeting to anyone, then the call of Christ will be able to gain you even while in the world. And every time the world comes to mind, you will remember your severance from it, as though by the clean cut of a knife.
—Matthew the Poor, Words For Our Time: The Spiritual Words of Matthew the Poor -
That trouble once removed, all change of scene will become pleasant; though you may be driven to the uttermost ends of the earth, in whatever corner of a savage land you may find yourself, that place, however forbidding, will be to you a hospitable abode. The person you are matters more than the place to which you go; for that reason we should not make the mind a bondsman to any one place. Live in this belief: “I am not born for any one corner of the universe; this whole world is my country.”
—Seneca, Letters from a Stoic -
Throwing away then all things, hold to these only which are few; and besides, bear in mind that every man lives only this present time, which is an indivisible point, and that all the rest of his life is either past or it is uncertain. Short then is the time which every man lives; and small the nook of the earth where he lives; and short too the longest posthumous fame, and even this only continued by a succession of poor human beings, who will very soon die, and who know not even themselves, much less him who died long ago.
—Marcus Aurelius, Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus -
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 -
They make one journey after another and change spectacle for spectacle. As Lucretius says, ‘Thus each man ever flees himself.’ But to what end, if he does not escape himself? He pursues and dogs himself as his own most tedious companion. And so we must realize that our difficulty is not the fault of the places but of ourselves. We are weak in enduring anything, and cannot put up with toil or pleasure or ourselves or anything for long. This weakness has driven some men to their deaths; because by frequently changing their aims they kept falling back on the same things and had left themselves no room for novelty. They began to be sick of life and the world itself, and out of their enervating self-indulgence arose the feeling ‘How long must I face the same things?’
—Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It
SO GOOD QUOTES 