“Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

Last update Nov. 2, 2021. History

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Madeleine L'Engle 223

American writer 1918–2007

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

“With all its horrors and all its failures, life was bearable where there were hot showers.”

Larry Niven (1938) American writer

Source: A Gift From Earth (1968), Chapter 3, "The Car" (p. 53)

“Life is a tragedy full of joy.”

Bernard Malamud (1914–1986) American author

New York Times (29 January 1979)

“Habit makes all things bearable.”
Quod male fers, adsuesce, feres bene.

Ovid book Ars amatoria

Book II, line 647 (tr. James Michie)
Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love)

“Truth is like nudity: It is on occasion indispensable, but it is dangerous and should not be displayed openly. It is truth that gives life its grandeur, but the polite fictions that make it bearable.”

Jack McDevitt book Infinity Beach

Source: Infinity Beach (2000), Chapter 8 (p. 110)

“Love has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest.”

Kay Redfield Jamison (1946) American bipolar disorder researcher

Source: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“Mystics of every faith report contacts with a world that startles and transforms them with its dazzling darkness. Zen stands squarely in this camp, its only uniqueness being that it makes breaking the language barrier its central concern.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

The World's Religions (1991)

“The power of the feeling is the gathering which edifies, the being seized by oneself, its blazing up, its fulguration, is the becoming of the being, the triumphant sudden appearance of the revelation. What becomes of, in the triumph of this sudden appearance, in the fulguration of the presence, in the Parousia and, lastly, when there is something instead of nothing, that’s the joy.”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Original: (fr) La puissance du sentiment est le rassemblement édificateur, l’être saisi par soi, son embrasement, sa fulguration, est le devenir de l’être, le surgissement triomphant de la révélation. Ce qui advient, dans le triomphe de ce surgissement, dans la fulguration de la présence, dans la Parousie et, enfin, quand il y a quelque chose plutôt que rien, c’est la joie.
Source: Michel Henry, L'Essence de la manifestation, 1963, t. 2, § 70, p. 831
Source: Books on Phenomenology of Life, The Essence of Manifestation (1963)

“In what other world is myth so harmless? Great battles kill and maim; great homers and no-hitters are pure joy or deep tragedy without practical consequence […]. Life is inherently ambiguous; baseball games pit pure good against abject evil. Even Saddam Hussein must have committed one act of kindness in his life, but what iota of good could possibly be said for aluminum bats or the designated hitter rule?”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

"Baseball and the Two Faces of Janus", p. 272; originally published as "The Virtues of Nakedness" in The New York Review of Books (1990-10-11)
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)

“Now the world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.”

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer

Great Novelists and Their Novels (1948)

“Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.”

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