
Source: The Freedom of a Christian (1520), pp. 73-74
Source: The Freedom of a Christian (1520), p. 74
Source: The Freedom of a Christian (1520), pp. 73-74
“A paradise of inward tranquility seems to be faith's usual result.”
Lectures XI, XII, and XIII, "Saintliness"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
“In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent.”
Source: Darkness Visible (1990), VI
Context: There is a region in the experience of pain where the certainty of alleviation often permits superhuman endurance. We learn to live with pain in varying degrees daily, or over longer periods of time, and we are more often than not mercifully free of it. When we endure severe discomfort of a physical nature our conditioning has taught us since childhood to make accommodations to the pain’s demands — o accept it, whether pluckily or whimpering and complaining, according to our personal degree of stoicism, but in any case to accept it. Except in intractable terminal pain, there is almost always some form of relief; we look forward to that alleviation, whether it be through sleep or Tylenol or self-hypnosis or a change of posture or, most often, through the body’s capacity for healing itself, and we embrace this eventual respite as the natural reward we receive for having been, temporarily, such good sports and doughty sufferers, such optimistic cheerleaders for life at heart.
In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come — not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying — or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity — but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
“One cannot reach paradise by creating Hell for others”
Morning Edition with Jacki Northam, National Public Radio, September 8, 2006, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5786976
Burial of the Dead reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
The Unknown Wisdom of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1994) edited by Bill Adler
“Corruption is nature's way of restoring our faith in democracy.”
As quoted in Backstabbing for Beginners : My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (2008) by Michael Soussan, p. 316
“Martyrs create faith, faith does not create martyrs.”
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God
“No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created.”
Aus dem Paradies, das Cantor uns geschaffen, soll uns niemand vertreiben können.
"Über das Unendliche" [On the Infinite] in Mathematische Annalen 95, (1926)
“Listening to the conversation, his faith in the stupidity of human nature was fully restored.”
Source: The Winds of Limbo aka The Fireclown (1965), Chapter 17 (p. 252)