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Quote by Lemony Snicket

“Few people can be happy," says a famous philosopher, "unless they hate some other person, nation or creed." "Creed" refers to what people believe, and I believe that everyone in the world should feel as welcome and safe as I did in that library. But of course that is not how the story goes. People are unwelcome and unsafe all over the world, and it is other people who make them feel that way. We all do. We are miserable at home, or at school, scared when we walk the streets, and we are terrorized in all sorts of places, ghastly and desperate, all over the globe. Not all suffering is the same, and we are not all suffering at the same time, but every person or nation or creed as had their turn, or is waiting their turn to suffer to to force suffering on us, sometimes so terribly that for some of us, at some moment somewhere in the world, the only escape is into the world of the imagination, because we cannot really imagine what is happening and what we have done.”

Quote by Lemony Snicket

Book:Poison for Breakfast
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Poison for Breakfast

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Lemony Snicket

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“... we find a complete contradiction in our wishing to live without suffering, a contradiction that is therefore implied by the frequently used phrase “blessed life.” This will certainly be clear to the person who has fully grasped my discussion that follows. This contradiction is revealed in this ethic of pure reason itself by the fact that the Stoic is compelled to insert a recommendation of suicide in his guide to the blissful life (for this is what his ethics always remains). This is like the costly phial of poison to be found among the magnificent ornaments and apparel of oriental despots, and is for the case where the sufferings of the body, incapable of being philosophized away by any principles and syllogisms, are paramount and incurable. Thus its sole purpose, namely blessedness, is frustrated, and nothing remains as a means of escape from pain except death. But then death must be taken with unconcern, just as is any other medicine. Here a marked contrast is evident between the Stoic ethics and all those other ethical systems mentioned above. These ethical systems make virtue directly and in itself the aim and object, even with the most grievous sufferings, and will not allow a man to end his life in order to escape from suffering. But not one of them knew how to express the true reason for rejecting suicide, but they laboriously collected fictitious arguments of every kind. This true reason will appear in the fourth book in connexion with our discussion. But the above-mentioned contrast reveals and confirms just that essential difference to be found in the fundamental principle between the Stoa, really only a special form of eudaemonism, and the doctrines just mentioned, although both often agree in their results, and are apparently related. But the above-mentioned inner contradiction, with which the Stoic ethics is affected even in its fundamental idea, further shows itself in the fact that its ideal, the Stoic sage as represented by this ethical system, could never obtain life or inner poetical truth, but remains a wooden, stiff lay-figure with whom one can do nothing. He himself does not know where to go with his wisdom, and his perfect peace, contentment, and blessedness directly contradict the nature of mankind, and do not enable us to arrive at any perceptive representation thereof. Compared with him, how entirely different appear the overcomers of the world and voluntary penitents, who are revealed to us, and are actually produced, by the wisdom of India; how different even the Saviour of Christianity, that excellent form full of the depth of life, of the greatest poetical truth and highest significance, who stands before us with perfect virtue, holiness, and sublimity, yet in a state of supreme suffering.”

SufferingSuicideStoicismSchopenhauer
Book:The World as Will and Representation, Volume I
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“But I do, Matt. I'm often worried about my ability to take it. Will I be able to measure up when real pain comes?" Father Matt snuffed out the cigarette he had bee smoking and casually said: "Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof." "Meaning?" questioned Father Lehmann. "Meaning that we are not supposed to borrow trouble. You've answered your own question, Jim, before you asked it." "How so?" "By the past six and a half years. You've taken it as it came along, Jim. You'll do the same in the future - if you have the future." "What do you mean: if I have a future?" "Jim, God gives us one moment at a time - only one. Not days; not hours; just moments. And He gives us grace for the moment at the moment; not the grace for the next moment. He gave you the grace you needed for yesterday, yesterday; what you need for today, today; and if you are to have a tomorrow, God will be faithful." (chapter 6)”

SufferingCatholicCatholicismCatholic Spirituality
Book:Your Hour
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“That is the purpose of this book - to make you happy. Its plan is to have you base that happiness on God's own truth as given us in the Gospels. Any other base would be unworthy of God and too weak for you. For yours is a tumultuous and a tottering world; made so by men who love the darkness rather than the light. Stability is to be found only in the unmoved Mover of this restless universe and in His Christ who is "the same, yesterday, today, and forever" (Heb. 13:8). Fear stalks your land. Crippling anxieties and neurotic unrests swarm about you. But that is only because the highly publicized gospels of Expediency and Efficiency have had too many followers who have been altogether too faithful, while the only true Gospel, and the only Gospel of Truth, has been too hesitantly trusted and too listlessly tried.”

HappinessSufferingCatholicCatholicismCatholic Spirituality
Book:Your Hour
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“However, Christianity has come to present us a new idea, all the more powerful in that it rests on a universal idea as old as the world, and that we needed to be rectified and sanctioned by revelation. So when the guilty ask us it is why the innocent suffer in his world, we are not lacking in responses, as you have seen, but we can choose one that is more direct and perhaps more convincing than all the others. We can reply: Innocence suffers for you, if you wish it.”

SufferingChristianitySacrificeCatholicismAtonementSubstitutionIndulgences
Book:St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence
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“The things that were told to me made sense to some degree. But I knew they weren't completely right either. There was something missing from their advice and assistance: Kristy...Kristy was missing. Where was Kristy in all of this? Because she certainly wasn't with me when I was making the choices that led to those moments of pain. Someone else was in control. In those moments, I didn't have my true voice. Kristy was hidden. And she was suffering.”

PainSufferingChoicesVoiceAdviceMissingControl
Book:Falling Into Fire
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