“Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost”
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Thomas Merton 92
Priest and author 1915–1968Related quotes
"The Answer" (1936)
Context: Know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars
and his history... for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.
“That’s all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Variant translations:
Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself. A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. It sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn't it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked on a word and made a mountain out of a pea — he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility… Do get up from your knees and sit down, I beg you, these posturings are false, too.
Part I, Book I: A Nice Little Family, Ch. 2 : The Old Buffoon; as translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, p. 44
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), p. 130
Cato, A Tragedy (1713)
Variant: "When love once pleads admission to our hearts..."
Act IV, scene i. The last line has often been misreported as "He who hesitates is lost", a sentiment inspired by it but not penned by Addison. See Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 3.