Wisdom doesn’t come from suffering. If it did, animals in experimental laboratories would be wiser than all of us. Wisdom comes from suffering reflected on, accepted, assimilated. But if we are so busy doing and experiencing that we have no time for quiet reflection, then life becomes not a connected whole but a pile of beads without a string. We have to take time to withdraw from the transitory in order to discover the permanent.
—Excerpted from God: The Oldest Question by William J. O’Malley, SJ