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

Preserve me, O God; For in thee do I take refuge.
[O my soul], thou hast said unto Jehovah,
Thou art my Lord: I have no good beyond thee.
As for the saints that are in the earth,
They are the excellent in whom is all my delight.
Their sorrows shall be multiplied that give gifts for another [god]:
Their drink-offerings of blood will I not offer,
Nor take their names upon my lips.
Jehovah is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup:
Thou maintainest my lot.
The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places;
Yea, I have a goodly heritage.
I will bless Jehovah, who hath given me counsel;
Yea, my heart instructeth me in the night seasons.

Psalms 16:1-7, ASV

Absolutely Clear

Don't surrender your loneliness
So Quickly.
Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight,
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice
So tender,

My need of God
Absolutely clear.

~Daniel Ladinsky,
quoted in Jennie Schroedel's article "From Loneliness to Solitude"

November 22, 1980

In the moment of recognition
we reach
for that
one
who comes new
upon the wind,
the presents around--
fresh fallen leaves,
the waters sound
and shoreward break

~Rodney Delmont Newton

--But yet, continued Gabriel, his voice falling into a softer inflection, there are always in gatherings such as this sadder thoughts that will recur to our minds: thoughts of the past, of youth, of changes, of absent faces that we miss here to-night. Our path through life is strewn with many such sad memories: and were we to brood upon them always we could not find the heart to go on bravely with our work among the living. We have all of us living duties and living affections which claim, and rightly claim, our strenuous endeavors.

~James Joyce, "The Dead"

Best I love September's yellow
Morns of dew strung gossamer,
Thoughtful days without a stir;
Rooky clamours, brazen leaves,
Stubble dotted o'er with sheaves-
More than Spring's bright uncontrol
Suit the Autumn of my soul.

~Alexander Smith

But love is the first comforter, and where love and truth speak, the love will be understood even where the truth is not. Love indeed is the highest in all truth; and the pressure of a hand, a kiss, the caress of a child, will do more to save, sometimes, than the wisest argument, even when rightly understood. Love alone is wisdom, love alone is power. And where love seems to fail, it is where self has stepped between and dulled the potency of its rays.

~George MacDonald, The Lady's Confession
ed. Michael Phillips

There is a comfort in the strength of love;
'Twill make a thing endurable, which else
Would overset the brain, or break the heart...

~William Wordsworth, "Michael: A Pastoral Poem"

Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours and ages that will follow it.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.

~Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy. For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger. And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine. And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man's ears to the voices of the day and voices of the night.

~Kahlil Gibran,
The Prophet

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

~Rainer Maria Rilke