Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning.
+ reality + truth + painful + hurt + painful truth + illusions + stories + comforting + lives + meaning + haruki marakami + IQ84 + meaningful
People don’t really want to be cured.
What they want is relief; a cure is painful.
+ eating disorder + addiction + cure + painful + relief + recovery + difficult + want
You can never return to the place of not knowing, to the unconsciousness of earlier days. Sometimes you may wish you could return, because the journey gets painful and the old days seem simpler in your memory. But you can’t go back, and even if you could, ultimately you wouldn’t choose to. It’s like having been blind all your life, and suddenly you’re able to see….movement, colors, and shapes…more than you ever imagined. And, even if you cover your eyes, you can never forget what you’ve seen.
We don’t even ask for happiness, just a little less pain.
+ charles bukowski + pain + happiness + less + survive + struggle + painful + content + okay + fine + emotions + ask
People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn’t bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn’t bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn’t even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn’t bear not to.
+ security + exist + painful + afterlife + religion + john green
Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.
“No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.
+ ― Vladimir Nabokov + sadness + painful + ache + restlessness + morbid + yearning + sick + nostalgia
When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace. ‘This is my last experiment,’ wrote a young chemist in his suicide note. ‘If there is any eternal torment worse than mine I’ll have to be shown.
+ kay jamison + suicide + pain + depression + paralyzed + nonexistent + despair + hopeless + present + painful + toture + solace
