“If we want to set our lives aright and find peace, it is not the tolerant attitude of others that will do it for us. It will come about, rather, by our learning how to show them compassion. If we try to avoid this hard struggle of compassion by preferring a withdrawn and solitary life, we will simply drag our unhealed obsessions into solitude with us. We might well have hidden them; we certainly will not have eliminated them. If we do not seek liberation from our obsessions, then becoming more withdrawn and less social may even make us more blind to them, since it can mask them.”
- St John Cassian
