Consolations Quotes

“Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.”
― Sigmund Freud , Moses and Monotheism

“You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“There are consolations that the strongest human love is powerless to give.
(page 330)”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“A true spouse of Christ gives little thought to herself. A person who constantly thinks of himself is rarely at peace, nor is a person who has no control of his desires, who yearns for material things beyond his means. Whoever has more concern for his body than he has for his soul, who insists on his own will instead of God’s will, who is more anxious about time than he is about eternity, more conscious of the absence of comforts than he is about the presence of God, more anxious to be loved and pampered than he is to love and suffer, more interested in receiving favors and being consoled than he is in aiding his neighbor and comforting others—there is a person who seldom knows peace.”
― Mother Catherine Thomas of Divine Providence, My Beloved: The Story of a Carmelite Nun