“I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves."
Ludwig Wittgenstein on BrainyQuote (https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/ludwig_wittgenstein_103576)
“What is happening to us is that we don’t know what is happening to us and that is exactly what is happening to us.”
José Ortega y Gasset, quoted by Allan Gotlieb in National Post November 17, 2000
“I came to the conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself."
G. K. Chesterton, quoted on Thinkexist.com
“Few Christian thinkers have so well understood [as Luther] the abyss of despair that is the alternative to the utterly gratuitous love of God in Christ.”
Richard John Neuhaus in First Things January 2004
“men who are called practical; and the much more practical pertinacity of the man who is called theoretical.”
G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas: “The Dumb Ox”
“The most basic form of human stupidity is forgetting what we are trying to accomplish.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7517225-the-most-basic-form-of-human-stupidity-is-forgetting-what) {BTW I have found this in various forms including “common” rather than “basic” - it’s apparently from Human, All Too Human but I couldn’t track down the German original]
"If the only way around distress is to stop loving, well, then, let us be men about it and settle for distress.”
Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb (the reference is not just or even primarily to romantic love but to fondness for all good things such as food, whiskey etc.)
“Laugh, and the world laughs with you;/ Weep, and you weep alone;/ For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,/ But has trouble enough of its own…. There is room in the halls of pleasure/ For a large and lordly train,/ But one by one we must all file on/ Through the narrow aisles of pain.”
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “Solitude,” in William Bennett The Book of Virtues [beginning and end of the poem]