• “The world is weary of me, and I am weary of it.” 

    —Charles D’Orleans

  • The hardest thing about life, it seems, is the impossibility of holding on to it

    —Grazie Sophia Christie

  • For several days Michel kept the photograph beside him on his bedside table. The mysteries of time were banal, he told himself, this was the way of the world: youthful optimism fades, and happiness and confidence evaporate. He lay on his Bultex mattress, struggling to come to terms with the transience of life.

    The Elementary Particles
    Michel Houellebecq

  • “Deep inside, each man feels—and believes—himself to be immortal, even if he knows he will perish the next moment. We can understand everything, admit everything, realize everything, except our death, even when we “ponder it unremittingly and even when we are resigned to it.”

    —E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

  • In life we pass through stages. The heart, thoughts, feelings and spirit all pass through them. Each stage has its impact and effect. It has a duration of time beyond which it does not go.

    Happy is the one who looks continually with hope for the next stage. 

    Happy is the one whom difficulties do not send to the other extreme. For a difficulty is only a stage in life and the solution of that difficulty is yet another stage. 

    Live with faith that there will be a solution and rejoice as you look forward to what cannot be seen. 

    The world itself is only a stage in life that will arrive at another stage, that of eternity.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Experiences in Life

  • Funny, isn’t it, how your whole life goes by while you think you’re only planning the way you’re going to live it?

    —Edna Ferber

  • If you do return to your birth country, it will be as a stranger, and you may find that the lemon groves whose scent is still so fragrant in your memory have been paved into parking lots. You will never find again the specific places or people or dreams that you’ve lost.

    —Susan Cain, Bittersweet

  • “Could I too choose to make the pain stop by staying busy? Eventually, the action was over and everyone had to go home. There is always a point when the doing ends, and then we are faced with the deafening and horrendous silence that is our thoughts.”

    —Joe Watson Jr., The End of Despair

  • “It is not freedom when we say to people that everything is permitted. That is slavery.”

    —Saint Paisios the Athonite

  • Fr. Bishoy was away from the monastery for a short time, and upon his return he was told a monk had passed away. In the world, even though a person who has died is enjoying the sights and splendor of Paradise, people on earth tend to ignore that and simply bemoan their death. For monastics, however, death is not treated in the usual manner; they regard it as simply leaving the monastery and returning home to Paradise. Hence, upon hearing that his friend had died, Fr. Bishoy simply said, “Oh what a shame, I wish I could have said goodbye before he left.” But that was it: no tears, no big deal.

    Orthodox Afterlife
    John Habib