“I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family’s, and my country’s past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things."
--Wally Lamb
Since then, I’ve gone from believing in these things to hoping in them. Because when you believe in something “unseen” to use Paul’s word, you become dogmatic. You can’t prove it to anyone, and so you end up insisting that you are right instead of insisting on what is right. But hope — hope leaves room for doubt. Hope embraces your doubt. I hope in God, but I could be wrong. I hope in heaven, but I could be wrong.
God is the primary, the ultimate Thou to such an extent that one cannot truly speak of God, in the their person, but only to him, in the second. I cannot imagine that a man who stood in a war trench or in a death camp and spoke to God can later stand in a lecture hall and speak of God as if this were the same one he had spoken to directly, in the trench.
In emphasizing the meaning potential of suffering, Frankl runs contrary to the current tendency of U.S. society, which is so success-and happiness-centered that people are apt to hide their suffering as if it were shameful. Suffering as a possible source of achievement is likely to be rejected by a nation that automatically answers the question ‘How are you?’ with a smile and ‘I’m fine,’ regardless.
Ring the bells that can still ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.
Perhaps the greatest lesson I have learned from this tragedy is the arrogance I had maintained in my relationship with time prior to the accident. I have learned how important it is to tell people when you love them, because tomorrow is just a concept of our minds.
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
There are times in the lives of most of us when we would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed.
Happiness and misery consist in a progression towards better or worse; it does not matter how high up or low down you are, it depends no on this, but on the direction in which you are tending.
The head of Eliza’s school told a story about a four-year-old who had a blue toy car he loved. He took it everywhere, played with it constantly. Then when his grandmother came to visit, she bought him ten toy cars, and he stopped playing with the cars altogether. ‘Why don’t you play with your cars?’ she asked. ‘You loved your blue car so much.’ ‘I can’t love lots of cars,’ he answered.
Even a modest pleasure can be a luxury if it’s scarce enough—ordering coffee at a restaurant, buying a book, or watching TV—which is why deprivation is one of the most effective, although unenjoyable, cures for the hedonic treadmill.
