“The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer because smaller things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of suffering.”
"Love is, in fact, an intensification of life, a completeness, a fullness, a wholeness of life."
- Thomas Merton
Love
"The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them."
- Thomas Merton
Love
"Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone—we find it with another."
- Thomas Merton
Love
"Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone — we find it with another."
- Thomas Merton
Love
"There is only one desire: to find the promised land and the freedom of a pure love that is without concern for anything else but love."
- Thomas Merton
Love
"Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful."
- Joshua J. Marine
Adversity
"The greater the difficulty, the more the glory in surmounting it."
- Epicurus
Adversity
"It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness."
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Adversity
"The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself—the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us—that’s where it’s at."
- Jesse Owens
Adversity
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress."
- Frederick Douglass
Adversity