Words Worth Noting - November 7, 2023

“To have a passing fever, or the smallpox is nothing, but to be oppressed by a feeling of faintness for whole years, to see all one’s relish for things destroyed, to have yet enough life to want to enjoy it but too little strength to do so, to become useless and unbearable to oneself, to die little by little, that is what I have suffered, and what has been more cruel than all my other trials.”

Voltaire, quoted in Cleveland Bruce Chase The Young Voltaire [in his first letter on returning to France from a youthful trip to England where he learned much but found the climate horrible]