Quotes
If thou bear it unwillingly, thou makest a burden for thyself and greatly increaseth thy load, and yet thou must bear it. If thou cast away one cross, without doubt thou shalt find another and perchance a heavier.
So long as it is hard to thee to suffer and thou desirest to escape, so long it will not be well with thee, and tribulations will follow thee everywhere.
Learn now to suffer a little, that then thou mayest be enabled to escape heavier sufferings.
There is no man in the world free from trouble or anguish, though he were King or Pope.
It is good for us that we sometimes have sorrows and adversities, for they often make a man lay to heart that he is only a stranger and sojourner, and may not put his trust in any worldly thing. It is good that we sometimes endure contradictions, and are hardly and unfairly judged, when we do and mean what is good. For these things help us to be humble, and shield us from vain-glory.
Occasions of adversity best discover how great virtue or strength each one hath. For occasions do not make a man frail, but they show what he is.
'Blind, dumb shit,' he spits, his breath like hot sandpaper in my ear. 'Where's this God you talk about? You think a caring intelligence would wipe out babies from hunger, watch decent folk scream and burn and bleed every second of the day and night? That ain't no God. Just fuckin people. You stuck with the rest of us in this snake-pit of human wants, wants frustrated and calcified into needs, achin and raw.'
If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"
Her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more. And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquility had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.
Human beings, in their generous endeavour to construct a hypothesis that shall not degrade a First Cause, have always hesitated to conceive a dominant power of lower moral quality than their own; and, even while they sit down and weep by the waters of Babylon, invent excuses for the oppression which prompts their tears.
For of all the miseries attaching to miserable love, the worst is the misery of thinking that the passion which is the cause of them all may cease.
We need to love. Even when it leads us to the land where the lakes are made of tears, to that secret, mysterious place, the land of tears!
