“The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade other people how good they are.”
G.K. Chesterton in the introduction to The Defendant
“It’s not what you are; it’s what you don’t become that hurts."
Oscar Levant, quoted as "Thought du jour" in Globe & Mail August 30, 2001
“The general rule which we have now pretty well established among them is that in all experiences which can make them happier or better only the physical facts are ‘Real’ while the spiritual elements are ‘subjective’; in all experiences which can discourage or corrupt them the spiritual elements are the main reality and to ignore them is to be an escapist.”
C.S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters.
“The dark night of the soul was not discovered by Freud; it was at the heart of the experience of faith.”
Charles J. Sykes, A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character
“‘I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism. – Roberto Rossellini; 1906-1977”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2238066-i-am-not-a-pessimist-to-perceive-evil-where-it
“Belief is favourable to the human mind, were it for nothing else but to furnish it entertainment. An infidel I should think, must frequently suffer from ennui. It was perhaps affectation in Socrates to say, that all he had learned to know was that he knew nothing. But surely it is a mark of wisdom, to be sensible of the limited extent of human knowledge, and to examine with reverence the ways of GOD, nor presumptuously reject any opinion which has been held by the judicious and the learned, because it has been made a cloak for artifice, or had a variety of fictions raised on it, by credulity.”
James Boswell, Esq. The Journal of a Tour To Corsica; & Memoirs of Pascal Paoli
“If this physical world is all, then it is a closed hell in which we are confined like prisoners in chains, condemned to watch the other prisoners being slain.”
John Updike quoted in Huston Smith Why Religion Matters
“Our life is no dream, but it should and will perhaps become one.”
Novalis, quoted in George Macdonald Lilith