“Hard times are a-coming, and people without useful, practical skills are going to suffer. Or suffer most.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“The afflicted don’t need comforting, they need what the comfortable have always had.”
Source: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
“The way we were treated as small children is the way we treat ourselves the rest of our life. And we often impose the most agonising suffering upon ourselves.”
Source: For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence
“We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear.”
“Sigmund Freud once asserted, "Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge." Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the "individual differences" did not "blur" but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints.”
Source: Man's Search for Meaning
“Suffering — how divine it is, how misunderstood! We owe to it all that is good in us, all that gives value to life; we owe to it pity, we owe to it courage, we owe to it all the virtues.”
Source: The garden of Epicurus
“Let me have a faithful account of all that concerns you; I would know everything, be it ever so unfortunate. Perhaps by mingling my sighs with yours I may make your sufferings less, for it is said that all sorrows divided are made lighter.”
Source: The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse
“It is ironic that constructive thinkers are often misunderstood as negative, as they differ from those longing for positivity: constructive thinkers have been conditioned to find positive in negative rather than suffering from the negative in negative. Or as Paul the Apostle wrote, 'I have learned the secret to contentment in any and every circumstance.' He was right. Indeed the Lord is our strength, especially under the commandment to love one another. Otherwise we are nothing and easily thrown about by both our own and other people's mind control in a painful, mental, physical desperation to run from every thought, every thing, and every one not seeming so positive or immediately beneficial to us.”
Source: Killosophy
“Toutes les opinions ne se valent pas, et il ne faut pas confondre l'éloquence d'une parole avec la justesse d'une pensée.”
Source: In Defence of the Enlightenment
“Pain without cause is a pain we can't trust. We assume it's been chosen or fabricated.”
Source: The Empathy Exams