life on planet earth on Thoughtlesness

Lord and God, you know what we are about to say in prayer, you know what we ought to say, and even what we need to say but cannot. Our sins trouble us, though they don’t trouble us as much as they sho...

Gracious God, your Son Jesus came not be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many. He is our Good Shepherd, whose leadership is less about the love of power, and more about the ...

[Describing many of his friends] Something that doesn’t have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It’s more like stomach...

Light griefs can speak; great ones are dumb.

If your idleness is a complete slump, that is, indecision, fretting, worry, or due to over-feeding and physical mugginess, that is bad, terrible and utterly sterile. Or if it is that idleness which so...

The incessant witless repetition of advertisers' moron-fodder has become so much a part of life that, if we are not careful, we forget to be insulted by it.

Loneliness is inner emptiness. Solitude is inner fulfillment.

The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.

Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care.

There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.

Loneliness comes over us sometimes as a sudden tide. It is one of the terms of our humanness, and, in a sense, therefore, incurable. Yet I have found peace in my loneliest times not only through accep...

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.

In solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility o...

Apathy is the acceptance of the unacceptable.

Solitude is rich but seldom hilarious.

Silence. All human unhappiness comes from not knowing how to stay quietly in a room.

A man is hindered and distracted in proportion as he draws outward things to himself.

Fools are without number.

In his novel, The Pale King , David Foster Wallace discusses the issue of boredom, or, as he puts it, dullness: . . . Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where ph...

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.

The mind in all its intricate beauty can be a place of great anguish. Thoughts can both grip us for the good and plague us for that which is not. In Dickens’ Christmas novella, The Chimes, he describe...

My friend Joi told me that when she was growing up, her parents invented a ploy to keep her from talking all of the time. They told her that people are allowed only so many words in one lifetime, and ...

"There are who never learn to see anything except in its relation to themselves, nor that relation except as fancied by themselves; and, this being a withering habit of mind, they keep growing dr...

Leisure . . . is an essential part of Benedictine spirituality. It is not laziness and it is not selfishness. It has something to do with depth and breadth, length and quality of life.

Most who know anything at all about the Oxbridge professor C. S. Lewis know that he wrote two books on pain and sorrow. One is more an apologetic on the nature of suffering, The Problem of Pain, and a...

Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man. But they don't bite everybody.

Poverty is the absence of linkages, the absence of connections with others.

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and...

An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, whil...