Patience is a spiritual strength that lowers the strength of sorrow. You don’t seek to reduce it or to make it go away. You have to endure sorrow because you don’t have a choice. But having to endure it without patience, it becomes a hundred times harder. The more willing you are to endure sorrow, the more your effort will margin its power. The less patient you are, the stronger they become, seeming very hard to endure. Through patience you can limit the sorrow, because patience is God’s power. You can actually feel this limiting power. It is a form of synergy: the more you entrust yourself into patience the more God, though His power will help you overcome sorrow.

(Translation from Părintele Dumitru Stăniloae, nota 698 la Sfântul Isaac Sirul, Cuvinte despre nevoinţă, în Filocalia XI, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2008, p. 221)