• Distress checks sensual pleasure; the fear of punishment withers desire.

    —St. Thalassios the Libyan

  • The experience of suffering afflicts the senses; distress annuls sensual pleasure.

    —St. Thalassios the Libyan

  • How hard it is to sit at home with nothing to do but wait. To wait—the most difficult thing in the whole world. To wait—with no living soul in whom to confide one’s doubts, one’s fears, one’s relentless hopes.

    —Anna Kavan, “Airing a Grievance”

  • You should dwell on something exactly to the point that dwelling on it further doesn’t do you any good.

    —Bret Weinstein

  • “He was looking for joy and found the Cross. What remedy is there for his sadness? He must rediscover the spirit of poverty. A rich person is someone who expects everything. A poor person is someone for whom everything is a gift. Nothing is owed us, not even our existence. ‘What do you have that you have not received?’ Friendship, happiness, joy are not owed us.”

    —Jean-Yves Leloup, Being Still

  • The practical person does not spend his life in the past, but he learns a lesson from it and works for the present and the future, with all his might…

    —Pope Shenouda III, Words of Spiritual Benefit Vol. 1

  • As for the outside cross, it is any affliction that the faithful endures for the sake of God, either of his own will or imposed on him.

    —Pope Shenouda III, Words of Spiritual Benefit Vol. 1

  • And just for the same reason we can more easily bear a misfortune which comes to us entirely from without, than one which we have drawn upon ourselves;

    —Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life

  • “If there had been a door within reach that led straight to death, he wouldn’t have hesitated to push it open, without a second thought.”

    —Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

  • Both spiritual knowledge and health are good by nature, yet their contraries have been of more benefit to many people.

    —St. Maximos the Confessor, Four-Hundred Texts on Love