#uf

The antique, almost primitive band he held between his fingers caught the sunlight, glinting silver. “I found this ring shortly after I was banished from heaven. I kept it to remind myself of how endless my sentence was, how eternal one small choice can be. I’ve kept it a long time. I want you to have it. You broke my suffering. You’ve given me a new eternity. Be my girl, Nora. Be my everything. ↗

— Becca Fitzpatrick

#suffering

What is a genius? A person who demands little to nothing from others, but is often found extremely difficult to have around. ↗

— Criss Jami

#creative #different #difficulties #distinction #envy

There is no ongoing spiritual life without this process of letting go. At the precise point where we refuse, growth stops. If we hold tightly to anything given to us, unwilling to let it go when the time comes to let it go or unwilling to allow it to be used as the Giver means it to be used, we stunt the growth of the soul. It is easy to make a mistake here, “If God gave it to me,” we say, “its mine. I can do what I want with it.” No. The truth is that it is ours to thank Him for and ours to offer back to Him, ours to relinquish, ours to lose, ours to let go of – if we want to find our true selves, if we want real life, if our hearts are set on glory. ↗

— Elisabeth Elliot

#hold-on #keep #let-go #mine #pain

We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world....No doubt pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. it removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of the rebel soul. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#pain #suffering #rebellion

To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [....] Without cruelty there is no festival. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#suffering #cruelty

If pain doesn't lead to humility, you have wasted your suffering. ↗

— Katerina Stoykova Klemer

#pain #personal-development #personal-growth #suffering #humility

We do not suffer by accident. ↗

— Jane Austen

#suffering #prejudice

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour. ↗

— Frederick Douglass

#activism #agitation #dissent #human-rights #liberties

A student, filled with emotion and crying, implored, "Why is there so much suffering?" Suzuki Roshi replied, "No reason. ↗

— Shunryu Suzuki

#philosophy #suffering #wisdom #zen #zen-buddhism

so the story goes but theres something you should know before i walk away and i blow the ending i never want to be without you oh no here i go now you know what i feel about you theres no running must have been wrong to doubt you oh there i go no control and i'm fallen so now you know ↗

— Hilary Duff

#hilary-duff #now-you-know #hilarious