• If you are constantly canceling plans with your friends, not following through, neglecting to answer messages for days and weeks on end, ignoring invitations, and not showing up for people at very important moments in their lives — that’s not introversion, that’s isolation.

    The Difference Between Being an Introvert and Isolating Yourself

  • I shall never be one of those directly active (except as a teacher, occasionally), but now and then I am made aware that my work, odd though it seems, does help people.

    Journal of a Solitude
    May Sarton

  • Two years ago we were both unhappy where we were and demanded a change. Two years later, we feel the same. Something is wrong. Something is making us miserable. Only now I’m starting to realize that it’s not our situation, not the job or the commute or living back home, it’s our inability to stomach the misery that is inherent in life.

    Lauren Martin, Enduring Bad Days: Using Sport Mentality To Combat The Work Week

  • Imagine a person who has been and is addicted to a passion. There comes a moment (as it does to everyone, perhaps many times – alas, perhaps many times in vain!), a moment he seems to be brought to a halt: a good resolution is awakening. Imagine that one morning he said to himself (let us suppose him to be a gambler), “I solemnly vow that I will nevermore have anything to do with gambling, never – tonight will be the last time” – ah, my friend, he’s lost! I would rather bet on the opposite, however strange that may seem. If there was a gambler who said to himself, “Well, now, you may gamble every blessed day all the rest of your life – but tonight you are going to leave it alone,” and he did – ah, my friend, he is saved for sure! The first gambler’s resolution is a trick by the craving, and the second gambler’s is to fool the craving.

    —Søren Kierkegaard

  • Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

    —Epicurus

  • The food barely filled me. I could have eaten forever, and I wouldn’t have felt a thing.

    Jami Attenburg, Protective Measures [from the book Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone]

  • The first sign of pride is to measure the other by your yardstick
    by Archpriest Sergei Filimonov.

    Why do we show dissatisfaction with others? Why are we annoyed with them or are angry? There are several reasons for this. First, we measure another person with our yardstick. When we are healthy, when our heart beats smoothly, normal pressure, when both eyes see and both knees bend, we can not understand another person who feels bad. Our character is equal, but maybe that person is a choleric person, or vice versa – he is calmer and more pragmatic than we are.

    “I”, which reigns in our heart, makes us look at other people through the prism of our own physical, mental and spiritual properties, and we involuntarily consider ourselves a stencil, a model for others. From this, a storm begins in my soul: I do, but he does not; I do not get tired, but he complains that he is tired; I sleep five hours, and you see, eight hours are not enough for him; I work tirelessly, but he shirks and early leaves to sleep. This is characteristic of a proud person; namely the proud says: “Why am I doing this, but he does not? Why do I keep it, but he does not? Why can I, but he can not cope? ”

    But the Lord created all people different. Each of us has our own life, our own way of life, our life situations. Well-fed does not understand, a healthy patient will never understand. A person who does not pass through troubles and temptations will not understand the grieving person. A happy father will not understand an orphaned child who has lost his father. The bride will not understand the divorced. A person who has parents alive will not understand the one who just buried his mother. One can theorize, but there is a practice of life. We often do not have life experience, and when we start to find it, we remember those who were condemned, with whom we were strict. We did not understand what this man was feeling. We tried to edify him, but he was not up to remarks. His hands sank with grief, his soul was mourning, he did not need moral teachings and high-flown words. All he needed was sympathy, compassion and consolation, but we did not understand it. And when the Lord conducts us through the same, we begin to feel what the other person felt.

    Here is one of the signs of pride – we measure other people by our yardstick. When we do this, it shows that there is no magnanimity in us. And all that is needed is to try not to condemn another person, not to be irritated, but to accept him as he is. But it is difficult.

  • You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me.

    —Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

  • I was aware that the best pleasures can be had without very much money-or with none at all.

    The Seven Story Mountain
    by Thomas Merton

  • Tom offered me a cigarette. The implication was that I was going to need it. Therefore, obviously, I refused it.

    The Seven Story Mountain
    by Thomas Merton