“Nostalgia is denial, denial of the painful present.”
— Paul, Midnight in Paris (2011)
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Or in surveying cities and spots of interest? All your bustle is useless. Do you ask why such flight does not help you? It is because you flee along with yourself. You must lay aside the burdens of the mind; until you do this, no place will satisfy you.
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You wander hither and yon, to rid yourself of the burden that rests upon you, though it becomes more troublesome by reason of your very restlessness.
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Do you suppose that you alone have had this experience? Are you surprised, as if it were a novelty, that after such long travel and so many changes of scene you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate. Though you may cross vast spaces of sea, your faults will follow you whithersoever you travel.
—Seneca, XXVIII. On Travel as a Cure for Discontent, Letters from a Stoic -
Do not have any partiality, not only either for food and drink, for dress, for a spacious and richly decorated dwelling, for the luxurious furniture of your house, but not even for your health, do not even have the least partiality for your life, give up all your life to the Will of the Lord, saying: “for, to me to live—is Christ and to die—is gain.” [Philippians 1.21]. “He that hateth his life in this world, shall keep it unto life eternal.” [John 12.25] Attachment to the temporary life, to one’s own health, leads to many deviations from God’s Commandments, to the indulgence of the flesh, to breaking the fasts, to evading the conscientious fulfilment of the duties connected with our service, to despondency, impatience, irritability. Never sleep before saying evening prayers, lest your heart should become gross from ill-timed sleep, and lest the enemy should hinder it by a stony insensibility during prayer.
—St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ -
“How will we know whether we are living according to the will of God or not? If you are sad for whatever reason, this means that you have not given yourself over to God, although from the outside it may seem that you have. He who lives according to God’s will has no worries. When he needs something, he simply prays for it. If he does not receive that which he asked for, he is joyful as though he had received it. A soul that has given itself over to God has no fear of anything, not even robbers, sickness, or death. Whatever happens, such a soul always cries, ‘It was the will of God.’”
—Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica -
To any impartial observer it appears that the human individual cannot be happy, and is in no way conceived for happiness, and his only possible destiny is to spread unhappiness around him by making other people’s existence as intolerable as his own—his first victims generally being his parents.
The Possibility of an Island
Michel Houellebecq -
Mizinova wanted marriage, but eventually realised that, for Chekhov, lasting mutual happiness was either something he didn’t believe in or saw as too great a threat to his freedom.
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There is sometimes such hardened unfeelingness in the soul that you do not perceive and do not feel your sins. You do not fear either death or the Judge, or the terrible judgment seat; you do not care a jot, as the saying is, about anything spiritual. O cunning, proud, evil flesh! It is not without reason that even the saints complain: ” I am overcome by the slumber of sloth, and the sleep of sin oppresses my heart. Avail thyself, my soul, of the time for repentance; shake off the heavy sleep of sloth, and hasten to watch.” Sometimes your soul is filled with such terrible slothfulness and hardened unfeelingness that you completely despair of being able to drive away this slothfulness and unfeelingness.
—St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ -
I felt that my whole life was bound to go on in the same solitude and helpless dreariness, from which I myself had no strength and even no wish to escape.
—Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness -
Scuffs and dents are just one obvious kind of mark. Every comment you make to somebody also leaves a mark. It’s unlikely, perhaps impossible, that it would have exactly zero effect on the rest of that person’s life, and so we must assume that they are, to some degree, forever changed.
We’ve left a path of lasting evidence throughout our whole lives. In fact, that’s really all our lives are: the impressions we’ve left, the moments we’ve created, the marks we’ve made. Once you’re dead and gone, the work you did is still done. The things you built still stand, or maybe lean or lie in rubble, but they won’t go away. The people who knew you still know you, and still operate under your influence, whether they know it or not.
Every second you exist, you’re scattering a broad trail of signatures on who knows what, laying causes to an untold ocean of effects that will carry on far beyond your death. The person who invented paper is certainly dead. Did his life affect yours today?
The founders of your city, of your religion, of your language, are all probably dead too, to say nothing of your great grandparents, or theirs. What if they had done something different with their time?
Each action you take creates a resounding shock wave that never entirely dissipates. Even in the grand scope of the whole planet, it matters. You matter, much more than you probably think.
You’re not a drop in the bucket, quite the opposite. In a very real way, the world will be profoundly and permanently changed as a result of what you do while you’re here. It can’t be helped.
That’s a lot of responsibility. What are you going to do with it?
What Your Dinged Up Car Can Teach You About the Universe
SO GOOD QUOTES 