• Remember that thou art an actor in a play of such a kind as the teacher (author) may choose; if short, of a short one; if long, of a long one: if he wishes you to act the part of a poor man, see that you act the part naturally; if the part of a lame man, of a magistrate, of a private person, (do the same). For this is your duty, to act well the part that is given to you; but to select the part, belongs to another.

    —Epictetus, Enchiridion

  • Wish to be considered to know nothing: and if you shall seem to some to be a person of importance, distrust yourself.

    —Epictetus, Enchiridion

  • If you love an earthen vessel, say it is an earthen vessel which you love; for when it has been broken, you will not be disturbed.

    —Epictetus, Enchiridion

  • “Men with little natural talent should not despair of themselves and become indolent as regards the God-loving and virtuous life, and despise it as unattainable, beyond their reach. Instead, they should exercise their capacity and take care of themselves. For even if they are unable to attain the limit with respect to virtue and salvation, through practice and aspiration they will become better or at least not become worse – which is no small profit for the soul.”

    —St. Anthony the Great

  • “When you’re doing something out of obligation, it costs you energy. When you’re doing something out of intention, it gives you energy.”

    —Erwin McManus

  • “For nine years a brother was assailed by the temptation to leave his community. Every day he got ready to go and picked up the cloak in which he used to wrap himself at night. At evening he would say, ‘I will go away tomorrow.’ At dawn he would think, ‘I ought to stay here and bear this temptation just today for the Lord’s sake.’ He did this every day for nine years, until the Lord took the temptation away.”

    The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks
    by Benedicta Ward

  • Between the rise of divorce and the growth of single parenthood, adults in contemporary households often no longer have spouses, let alone a traditional extended family, to turn to for support. Children, let loose by the weakening of parental authority and supervision, spin out of orbit at ever-earlier ages. Both look to friends to replace the older structures. Friends may be “the family we choose,” as the modern proverb has it, but for many of us there is no choice but to make our friends our family, since our other families—the ones we come from or the ones we try to start—have fallen apart. When all the marriages are over, friends are the people we come back to. And even those who grow up in a stable family and end up creating another one pass more and more time between the two. We have yet to find a satisfactory name for that period of life, now typically a decade but often a great deal longer, between the end of adolescence and the making of definitive life choices. But the one thing we know is that friendship is absolutely central to it.

    Faux Friendship
    By William Deresiewicz

  • Fear of Your Parents’ Old Age

    “There is a break in the family history, where the ages accumulate and overlap, and the natural order makes no sense: it’s when the child becomes the parent of their parent.”

    It’s when the father grows older and begins to move as if he were walking through fog. Slowly, slowly, imprecisely.

    It’s when one of the parents who once held your hand firmly when you were little no longer wants to be alone.

    It’s when the father, once strong and unbeatable, weakens and takes two breaths before rising from his seat.
    …
    Our last lesson. An opportunity to return the care and love they gave us for decades.
    …
    We cannot leave them for even a moment.
    …

    Happy is the child who becomes the parent of their parent before their death, and unfortunate is the child who only appears at the funeral and doesn’t say goodbye a little each day.

    …

    Rocking his father back and forth. Caressing his father. Calming his father. And he said softly:

    I’m here, I’m here, Dad! “What a father wants to hear at the end of his life is that his child is there.”

  • Without His word, marriage becomes a burden, a trial, and an anxiety. This is what causes people to utter, “I wish I never got married.”


    —Matthew the Poor, Words For Our Time: The Spiritual Words of Matthew the Poor

  • There is something pleasing and salutary in someone’s having had ill-luck in his first love, when he has come to know its pain but still kept true to his love, still kept faith in this first love; there is something nice about it when, in the course of years, he sometimes now recalls it quite vividly, and although his soul has been sound enough to, so to speak, take leave of that kind of life in order to dedicate itself to something higher, there is something pleasing about his then remembering it sadly as something that may have fallen short of perfection but was very beautiful none the less.

    Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
    Søren Kierkegaard