Response

“As soon as anyone comes close to me, his personality begins to oppress my vanity and restrict my freedom. I’m capable of hating the best men in twenty-four hours: one because he sits too long over his dinner, another because he has a cold in the head and keeps blowing his nose. But, on the other hand, it invariably happened that the more I hated men individually, the more ardent became my love for humanity at large.” -Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“You can bind up my leg, but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice.” -Epictetus

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” -Viktor Frankl

Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote that “Hell is other people.”

Not exactly.

Hell is our response–specifically an uncontrolled and thoughtless one–to other people.