“Suffering drives progress.- The source of all suffering is the desire for a change in state. This is also the source of all progress. The desire to change your state is what powers you to take action.
With craving, we are dissatisfied but driven. Without craving, we are satisfied but lack ambition.”
Source: Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
“I go to bed and before falling asleep I talk to Lucas in my head the way I have for many years. What I tell him is just about what I usually do. I tell him that if he's dead he's lucky and I'd very much like to be in his place. I tell him that he got the better deal, that it is I who is pulling the greater weight. I tell him that life is totally useless, that it's nonsense, an aberration, infinite suffering, the invention of a non-God whose evil surpasses understanding.”
Source: The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels
“He who perpetrates an outrage may well be quick to forget what he has done. But they who have suffered at his hands are justified at least in remembering the wrongs he has done them.”
Source: The Crimes of Love
“The people of Ike-no-o used to say that Zenchi Naigu was lucky to be a priest: no woman would ever want to marry a man with a nose like that. Some even claimed it was because of his nose that he had entered the priesthood to begin with. The Naigu himself, however, never felt that he suffered any less over his nose for being a priest. Indeed, his self-esteem was already far too fragile to be affected by such a secondary fact as whether or not he had a wife.”
Source: Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories
“Have I not suffered enough, that you seek to increase my misery?”
Source: Frankenstein: The 1818 Text
“Sometimes we think that the most important thing in our life is body health, and it is not. The most important thing is our existential dialogue with God, our constant response to God with prayer and works.”
“Jak wygląda świat, kiedy życie staje się tęsknotą? Wygląda papierowo, kruszy się w palcach, rozpada. Każdy ruch przygląda się sobie, każda myśl przygląda się sobie, każde uczucie zaczyna się i nie kończy, i w końcu sam przedmiot tęsknoty staje się papierowy i nierzeczywisty. Tylko tęsknienie jest prawdziwe, uzależnia. Być tam, gdzie się nie jest, mieć to, czego się nie posiada, dotykać kogoś, kto nie istnieje. Ten stan ma naturę falującą i sprzeczną w sobie. jest kwintesencją życia i jest przeciwko życiu. Przenika skórę do mięśni i kości, które zaczynają odtąd istnieć boleśnie. Nie boleć. Istnieć boleśnie – to znaczy, że podstawą ich istnienia był ból. Toteż nie ma od takiej tęsknoty ucieczki. Trzeba by uciec poza własne ciało, a nawet poza siebie. Upijać się? Spać całe tygodnie? Zapamiętywać się w aktywności aż do amoku? Modlić się nieustannie?”
Source: House of Day, House of Night
“We are to be agents of His great upside down Kindgom, where the outcasts are listened to, the broken are given dignity, and those suffering under the weight of sexual exploitation are rescued and healed.”
Source: We Too: How the Church Can Respond Redemptively to the Sexual Abuse Crisis
“When once we have discovered how pain and suffering diminish the personality and how joy alone increases it, then the morbid attraction which is felt for evil, pain and abnormality will have lost its power. Why do we reward our men of genius, our suicides, our madmen and the generally maladjusted with the melancholy honours of a posthumous curiosity? Because we know that it is our society which has condemned these men to death and which is guilty because, out of its own ignorance and malformation, it has persecuted those who were potential saviours; smiters of the rock who might have touched the spring of healing and brought us back into harmony with ourselves. Somehow, then, and without going mad, we must learn from these madmen to reconcile fanaticism with serenity. Either one, taken alone, is disastrous, yet except through the integration of these two opposites there can be no great art and no profound happiness--and what else is worth having? For nothing can be accomplished without fanaticism and without serenity nothing can be enjoyed.”
Source: The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus
“Why are we afraid of
death?
We are afraid because instinctively we resist change and death is an abrupt change
in life.
- HDH Bhagawan Sri Nithyananda Paramashivoham, in the book "Living Enlightenment".”
Source: Living Enlightenment