SO GOOD QUOTES

All fruits, the various flesh of animals, were given to him for food, and various drinks were given to him to please his taste—but not to excite his passions, not for his only enjoyment, for the Christian has great, spiritual, Divine enjoyments. Carnal delights must be always made subject to these higher ones; they must be restrained or completely suppressed when they hinder spiritual delights. This signifies that it is not to afflict man that food and drink are temporarily forbidden him by the Church, not to limit his freedom, as worldly people say, but it is done in order to afford him true, lasting, and eternal delights; therefore meat or flesh food, and wine and spirits, are forbidden (during Lent), specially by reason of the fact that man is very dear to God, and in order that his heart should cling to God alone, and not to anything perishable, unworthy of him. But man, perverted by sins, easily attaches himself to earthly pleasures, forgetting that his true enjoyment, his true life, is the eternal God, and not the pleasant excitation of the flesh.

—St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ