SO GOOD QUOTES

  • It seems like a mistake of history that our species has such a casual fondness for what is actually a very hard drug. It’s only drinking’s popularity that makes it seem like a sane thing to do—fairly normal doses are enough to make people sway and stumble, say rude things, throw up, writhe in bed the next day, and often much worse. It’s addictive, expensive, frequently life-ruining. Even the kindest person in the world, having had enough alcohol, becomes awful to be around.

    —David Cain, Goodbye Booze, For Now

  • How is it possible for drunkenness to be such a worthwhile drug experience that I’d do a thousand times? Even if it was free, physiologically healthy and zero-calorie, the drug itself still represents a very questionable tradeoff in terms of mental faculties. For a few hours, you gain some relief from rumination and stress, and it’s easier to laugh and open up. But you lose a significant degree of what are probably the best human capacities: judgment, self-control, intelligence, basic awareness, and kindness.

    —David Cain, Goodbye Booze, For Now

  • “As God’s athlete, be sober: eternal life is at stake.”

    —St. Ignatius of Antioch

  • One great piece of mischief has been done by the modern restriction of the word Temperance to the question of drink. It helps people to forget that you can be just as intemperate about lots of other things. A man who makes his golf or his motor-bicycle the centre of his life, or a woman who devotes all her thoughts to clothes or bridge or her dog, is being just as ‘intemperate’ as someone who gets drunk every evening. Of course, it does not show on the outside so easily: bridge-mania or golf-mania do not make you fall down in the middle of the road. But God is not deceived by externals.

    —C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

  • I always remember an alcoholic friend who expressed to me his frustration at praying daily for God to remove his desire for drink. Was God even listening? Later it dawned on him that the desire for alcohol was the main reason he prayed so diligently. Persistent temptation had compelled persistent prayer.

    Unanswered prayer: God, where are you?

  • “Sometimes I feel like I’m slowly floating away. I’m constantly looking for something to grab on to so I don’t lose myself.”

    —Kasie West, Pivot Point

  • “If a man has no sense of meaning, he will numb himself with pleasure.”

    — Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
    (via Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy by Donald Miller)

  • The demons generally produce in us the opposite of what has just been said. For when they take possession of the soul and extinguish the light of the mind, then there is no longer in us poor wretches either sobriety, or discernment, or self-knowledge or shame; but there is indifference, lack of perception, want of discernment and blindness. 

    What has just been said is known very vividly by those who have subdued their lust in order to become chaste, who have curbed their freedom of speech and have changed from shamelessness to modesty. They know how after the sobering of the mind, after the ending of its blindness, or rather its maiming, they are inwardly ashamed of themselves for what they said and did before when they were living in blindness.

    —St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent

  • The fact that most of us experience throughout most of our lives a sense of absence or distance from God is the great illusion that we are caught up in; it is the human condition.  The sense of separation from God is real, but the meeting of stillness reveals that this perceived separation does not have the last word.  This illusion of separation is generated by the mind and is sustained by the riveting of our attention to the interior soap opera, the constant chatter of the cocktail party going on in our heads.  For most of us this is what normal is, and we are good at coming up with ways of coping with this perceived separation (our consumer-driven entertainment culture takes care of much of it).  But some of us are not so good at coping, and so we drink ourselves into oblivion or cut or burn ourselves “so that the pain will be in a different place and on the outside.”

    Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation
    Martin Laird

  • James has had only one slip in five years.  But on any given day there could be a near miss.  He looks and acts perfectly normal.  “People look at me and presume that because I appear to be reasonably well put together, everything is fine.  They have no idea what it is like for me on the inside, how each day is an ordeal just coping with the storms of chaos in my mind.”

    Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation
    Martin Laird