SO GOOD QUOTES

One is cautious in life, constraining the self until it walks uprightly, and yet rejoicing from the inside. I always tell people that the narrow gate is narrow at the beginning. It is triangular shaped: at the beginning you find difficulty, and the farther you go, it widens, until you reach its wide base of joy. The beginning is the period where “the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; but at the end, the more the body surrenders to the spirit, and the more the spirit takes its ease, the more the person rejoices saying, “He also brought me out into a broad place.”! He took me out of the stage of war between the body (matter) and spirit, and brought me into a broad place-God’s love, in which a person lives happy.

—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Monastic Treasures for All of Us