SO GOOD QUOTES

Struggle with your flesh until it is humbled. Once it is used to this modest and rough environment, it will become your mute slave. Humility of the flesh will be granted at last. You should always keep this in sight and strive for it as a reward for your labors. Physical podvigs [spiritual struggles] foster physical virtues: solitude, silence, endurance, vigilance, labor, patience in deprivations, purity, and virginity.

You should remember that this friend of yours will end up in the grave. They say: Do not trust the flesh—it is deceitful. When you come to believe it is humbled, you relax, and it immediately grabs you and conquers you. This war with it continues to the grave, but it is much harder at first. Later it gets easier and easier until finally there remains only attention to its behavior with occasional light sensations of fleshly upsurge.

—St. Theophan the Recluse, The Path to Salvation: A Manual of Spiritual Transformation