“The simple person is transparent. He doesn’t know how to be two different people.”
Simplicity in relationship to my neighbor means that I am towards others as I am towards God. I don’t have two faces, or three faces, or four faces, but what you see is what you get. Exactly how I am in my room alone with God is exactly how I am in public. I don’t know how to be different. I don’t know how to wear a mask. I don’t know how to pretend to be this for that person and this for that person and this for God. The simple person is transparent. He doesn’t know how to be two different people.
—Fr Kyrillos Ibrahim
He who is precise is not only meticulous when he is among people but even more so when he is alone in his private room. Precision is relatively easy in the presence of people because by nature we do not like to be criticized by others and fear exposing our faults and weaknesses before them. That is why the true criterion of our precision is made manifest when we are alone, seen by no one. If we are precise when we are alone, then it is a true precision without hypocrisy.—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Characteristics of the Spiritual Path
We must reconcile our way of life within the Church and our way of life outside it, so that they proceed along the same line without any contradictions.
It is not good for a person to have two personalities: one for the House of God and another for the world.
The righteous person is always the same, he does not wear a different face for each different occasion.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Experiences in Life
“Act, in whatever you do, as you would act if anyone at all were looking on; because solitude prompts us to all kinds of evil.”
—Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
“For as I am outside, so I am within.”
—Abba John Colobos
SO GOOD QUOTES 