The noblest mind the best contentment has.

~Edmund Spenser,
The Faerie Queene

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.

~C.S. Lewis,
The Problem of Pain

...A woman ought to weave peace,
not snatch away life for imagined slights.

~Beowulf, translated by Alan Sullivan and Timothy Murphy (2002)
Masters of British Literature, Volume I, Longman

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.

~E.B. White,

Charlotte's Web

Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.

~Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

Slow down and enjoy life. It's not only the scenery you miss by going too fast - you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.

~Eddie Cantor (1892-1964)

Once torched by truth, [...] a little thing like faith is easy.
~Leif Enger,
Peace Like a River, 2001

To be good company for ourselves we must store our minds well, fill them with happy and pure thoughts, with pleasant memories of the past and reasonable hopes for the future.
~John Lubbock

Only when the heart loves can intellect do great work.

~N.D. Hillis

Pain and loss are bitter providences. Who has lived long in this world of woe without weeping, sometimes until the head throbs and there are no more tears to lubricate the convulsing of our amputated love? But O, the folly of trying to lighten the ship of suffering by throwing God's governance overboard. The very thing the tilting ship needs in the storm is the ballast of God's good sovereignty, not the unburdening of deep and precious truth. What makes the crush of calamity sufferable is not that God shares our shock, but that his bitter providences are laden with the bounty of love.

~John Piper,
The Misery of Job and the Mercy of God

"There are in this world blessed souls, whose sorrows all spring up into joys for others; whose earthly hopes, laid in the grave with many tears, are the seed from which spring healing flowers and balm for the desolate and the distressed. "

~Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Uncle Tom's Cabin

At the end of the day the only thing that matters is-
Did you live your life lovingly?
The source of joy or pain is in that response.

~Corey Amaro,
Tongue in Cheek

When our passion leads us to do something, we forget our duty; for example, we like a book and read it, when we ought to be doing something else. Now to remind ourselves of our duty, we must set ourselves a task we dislike; we then plead that we have something else to do and by this means remember our duty.

~Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Worth While
It is easy enough to be pleasant,
When life flows by like a song,
But the man worth while is one who will smile,
When everything goes dead wrong.
For the test of the heart is trouble,
And it always comes with the years,
And the smile that is worth the praises of earth
Is the smile that shines through tears.
It is easy enough to be prudent,
When nothing tempts you to stray,
When without or within no voice of sin
Is luring your soul away;
But it's only a negative virtue
Until it is tried by fire,
And the life that is worth the honor of earth
Is the one that resists desire.
By the cynic, the sad, the fallen,
Who had no strength for the strife,
The world's highway is cumbered to-day;
They make up the sum of life.
But the virtue that conquers passion,
And the sorrow that hides in a smile,
It is these that are worth the homage on earth
For we find them but once in a while.

~Ella Wheeler Wilcox 1850-1919

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

~Viktor Frankl (1905-1997),
former prisoner of a Nazi concentration camp

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; to listen to the stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart; to bear on cheerfully, do all bravely, awaiting occasions, worry never; in a word to, like the spiritual, unbidden and unconcious, grow up through the common--this is my symphony.

~William Henry Channing

You have laid the table well
For those who would feast on sorrows.

You have given trials richly
To those You know must grow.

Yet must this be so?
Can only through the pain,
So very like the pains of death
The gift of wisdsom find its rest?

I am not weak, and bitterness
In me finds little consolation
That it should live or grow
Near to my chest.

Yet even so, I find the
Call to suffer and to suffer well
More cryptic than all the twists of
Gordium. Shall I rest?

I do not think that rest was made for you.
Much wisdom is your stock
And wisdom brings its sweetness and its pain.
Endure and learn.

With time, you shall, I think, find hope
To rise again.

~G.B.

It is good to be tired and wearied by the vain search after the true good, that we may stretch out our arms to the Redeemer.

~Blaise Pascal, Pensées