#denial

What will you do with your self? Many men and women are still in darkness, trying to figure out the meaning and purpose of life. But no matter what you try to do with your self— whether you deny it, obliterate it, annihilate it, accept it or express it—believe me, it is still alive and kicking. ↗

— K.P. Yohannan

#self-denial #life

Those who deny guilt and sin are like the Pharisees of old who thought our Saviour had a “guilt complex” because He accused them of being whited sepulchers—outside clean, inside full of dead men’s bones. Those who admit that they are guilty are like the public sinners and the publicans of whom Our Lord said, “Amen, I say to you, that the publicans and the harlots shall go into the Kingdom of God before you” (Matt. 21:31). Those who think they are healthy but have a hidden moral cancer are incurable; the sick who want to be healed have a chance. All denial of guilt keeps people out of the area of love and, by inducing self-righteousness, prevents a cure. The two facts of healing in the physical order are these: A physician cannot heal us unless we put ourselves into his hands, and we will not put ourselves into his hands unless we know that we are sick. In like manner, a sinner’s awareness of sin is one requisite for his recovery; the other is his longing for God. When we long for God, we do so not as sinners, but as lovers. ↗

— Fulton J. Sheen

#guilt #healing #love

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. ↗

— Judith Lewis Herman

#post-traumatic-stress #psychotherapy #taboo #trauma #truth

Good breeding is the result of good sense, some good nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others. ↗

— Lord Chesterfield

#good #good breeding #good nature #good sense #little

If we can but tear the blindfold of self-deception from our eyes and loosen the gag of self-denial from our voices, we can restore our country to greatness. ↗

— Theodore C. Sorensen

#eyes #gag #greatness #loosen #our

A good father believes that he does wisely to encourage enterprise, productive skill, prudent self-denial, and judicious expenditure on the part of his son. ↗

— William Graham Sumner

#does #encourage #enterprise #expenditure #father

Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. ↗

— Charles Bradlaugh

#better #denial #free #free speech #speech

If I don't read page ninety, it won't have happened to them. Black Beauty will still live with all his friends at Birtwick Park … The knights will be able to go on having jolly adventures without Lancelot meeting Guinevere and bringing the whole Round Table crashing down into ruin on their heads… ↗

— Barbara Hambly

#beauty

What state do you live in? Denial. ↗

— Bill Watterson

#humor #humor

To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#life #soul #spiritual-development #truth #experience