• For if you do this the Scripture will expel your despondency and engender pleasure, extirpate vice and make virtue take root, and in the tumult of life it will save you from suffering like those who are tossed by troubled waves.

    Saint John Chrysostom, On the Vanity of Riches
    HOMILY ONE
    On Eutropios the eunuch, patrician, and consul

  • She hates her friends when they try to soften her grief; she will not take food, she wastes away, and in her soul’s deep dejection has a strong longing only for her death, a longing which often lasts till it comes.

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

  • There are those who are called the slothful in the book of Wisdom, who strew their path with thorns, who consider harmful to the soul a zeal for deeds in keeping with the commandments of God, the demurrers against the apostolic injunctions, who do not eat their own bread with dignity, but, fawning on others, make idleness the art of life. Then, there are the dreamers who consider the deceits of dreams more trustworthy than the teachings of the Gospels, calling fantasies revelations. Apart from these, there are those who stay in their own houses, and still others who consider being unsociable and brutish a virtue without recognizing the command to love and without knowing the fruit of long-suffering and humility.

    James Stuart Bell, ed., Ancient Faith Study Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bibles, 2019), 752.

    They stay in their homes and “isolate from others” and their community. One of the most dangerous things people do is isolate themselves from the church community. All of this is a big thorn that you are putting in your life that makes you lazy, that makes you not put effort, and makes you isolated, and makes the devil easy to control you and change you.

    —Fr. Mina Dimitri, inspired by Gregory of Nyssa’s On Virginity, Chap. 23

    They take from people (by flattery, by anger, by complaining, by manipulation). Sometimes they’re lazy, dependent fully on their family, yet they’re still yelling and disrespecting their own family.

    —Fr. Mina Dimitri

  • The things I desire are still an obstacle to my flourishing, but I don’t think that’s going anywhere — I’m too optimistic about my cruel optimism.

    cruel optimism new year
    rayne fisher-quann

  • One should never assert that one feels well; something awful is sure to happen.

    Journal of a Solitude
    May Sarton

  • “How are you?”
    “Good–”
    “Give it time…”

    —Eugene Thacker, Infinite Resignation: On Pessimism

  • I am in a limbo that needs to be patterned from within. People who have regular jobs can have no idea of just this problem of ordering a day that has no pattern imposed on it from without.

    Journal of a Solitude
    May Sarton

  • There is nothing to be done but go ahead with life moment by moment and hour by hour—put out birdseed, tidy the rooms, try to create order and peace around me even if I cannot achieve it inside me.

    Journal of a Solitude
    May Sarton

  • This morning I woke at four and lay awake for an hour or so in a bad state. It is raining again. I got up finally and went about the daily chores, waiting for the sense of doom to lift—and what did it was watering the house plants. Suddenly joy came back because I was fulfilling a simple need, a living one. Dusting never has this effect (and that may be why I am such a poor housekeeper!), but feeding the cats when they are hungry, giving Punch clean water, makes me suddenly feel calm and happy.

    Journal of a Solitude
    May Sarton

  • So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands. The reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive.

    Journal of a Solitude
    May Sarton