Mari Ruti Quotes

When our stoicism interferes with our humanity, we risk developing a wooden emotional life and an equally wooden personality. In contrast, the realization that our ability to work through pain makes us stronger than all of our efforts to exorcise it may in the long run alleviate its burden. It may enable us to take up our destiny as creatures whose very vulnerability renders us capable of inspired and truly awe-inspiring love.

We routinely replace damanged parts of ourselves with new ones that are, arguably, more resilient, more able to handle challenges. As long as we avoid the trap of growing our skin so thick that nothing gets through, getting bruised can only boost our ability to cope with whatever life throws at us.

Older people are wise not only because they have lived longer. They're wise because they have lost more.

Life has a way of turning things around. Those who mourn well know this. As a result, they also live well--with courage and curiosity.

What makes this inner void so difficult to deal with is that it's amorphous. We can't fix it because we can't pinpoint its precise cause. And even if we could, we wouldn't be able to banish it. It's the price we pay for being human.

We are taught to believe that having deep passions is foolish at best and dangerous at worst. We live in a cultural moment that is suspicious of ardent desires and strong commitments, propagating the idea that few things in life matter, that we have outlived ideals and ethical principles, and that comprehensive cultural change is impossible. Many of us have adopted the view that because we cannot remedy the enormous inequalities of the social world, we should not even bother to try. We have resigned ourselves to the idea that in the long haul nothing we do has any real impact and that caring too much is consequently a waste of our energies. By the same token, our (postmodern and sophisticated) recognition that meaning is inherently relative at times causes us to stop looking for meaning altogether. Though we are surrounded by a multitude of objects, artifacts, cultural icons, and shimmering images, few of these items manage to affect us on a deep level. In some ways, we are increasingly reconciled to the idea that the best we can do is to avoid the more crushing disillusionments of life–that the less we invest ourselves, the more inoculated we are against the misfortunes of the world.

Yet if we are to take the Lacanian account of singularity seriously, we must admit that what really counts in life is not our ability to evade chaos, but rather our capacity to meet it in such a manner as to not be irrevocably broken or demolished.