Ilaria

“It's true, I suffer a great deal--but do I suffer well? That is the question.”
― Therese de Lisieux, St. Therese of Lisieux: Her Last Conversations

“For each now strives to isolate his person as much as possible from the others, wishing to experience within himself life's completeness, yet from all his efforts there results not life's completeness but a complete suicide, for instead of discovering the true nature of their being they lapse into total solitariness. For in our era all are isolated into individuals, each retires solitary within his burrow, each withdraws from the other, conceals himself and that which he possesses, and ends by being rejected of men and by rejecting them. He ammasses wealth in solitariness, thinking: how strong I am now and how secure, yet he does not know, the witless one, that the more he ammasses, the further he will sink into suicidal impotence. For he has become accustomed to relying upon himself alone has isolated himself from the whole as an individual, has trained his soul not to trust in help from others, in human beings and mankind, and is fearful only of losing his money and privileges he has acquired. In every place today the human mind is mockingly starting to lose its awareness of the fact that a person's true security consists not in his own personal, solitary effort, but in the common integrity of human kind.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The individuation journey — the psychological quest for wholeness — ends in the union of opposites; in the inner marriage of “masculine” and “feminine” aspects of the personality that can be symbolized by the image of yin and yang contained within a circle. Said more abstractly and without assigning gender, the journey toward wholeness results in having the ability to be both active and receptive, autonomous and intimate, to work and to love. These are parts of ourselves that we come to know through life experiences, parts that are inherent in all of us. This is the human potential.”
― Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses in Everywoman

“To enter the valley of love, one must plunge wholly into fire. Yes, we must become one with the fire itself, for otherwise one cannot live there. He that truly loves must resemble fire, his countenance aflame, burning and . impetuous like fire.”
― Farid ud-Din Attar