Ecclesiastes 1:16-17 NKJV
I communed with my heart, saying, “Look, I have attained greatness, and have gained more wisdom than all who were before me in Jerusalem. My heart has understood great wisdom and knowledge.” And I set my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is grasping for the wind.


Foot note:
“Solomon found that knowledge and prudence were preferable to ignorance and folly, though human wisdom and knowledge will not make a man happy. The most learned of men, who dies a stranger to Christ Jesus, will perish equally with the most ignorant; and what good can commendations on earth do to the body in the grave, or the soul in hell? And the spirits of just men made perfect cannot want them. So that if this were all, we might be led to hate our life, as it is all vanity and vexation of spirit.”

One person is given the quality of wisdom, another the quality of spiritual knowledge, another the quality of faith, and someone else one of the other gifts of the Spirit enumerated by St Paul (cf. 1 Cor. 12:8-11). In the same way, one person receives through the Spirit, according to the degree of his faith, the gift of that perfect and direct love for God which is free from all materiality; another through the same Spirit receives the gift of perfect love for his neighbor and another receives something else from the same Spirit. In each, as I have said, the gift that conforms with his state is energized. For every capacity for fulfilling a commandment is called a gift of the Spirit.

St Maximos the Confessor Various Texts on Theology, the Divine Economy, and Virtue and Vice First Century

Not only do people differ from one another (Letter 157); indeed, even circumstances within one and the same person may differ from time to time (Letter 842). This is why “conscience” plays an important role in these letters. Conscience implies the integral knowledge of many aspects and factors that are interconnected and interdependent. It is a knowledge that is more intuitive than analytical, a knowledge that invites and involves the subconscious, the conscious and the supraconscious levels.

Letters from the Desert: A Selection of Questions and Responses (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press Popular Patristics Series)

“If your Bible is closed and you haven’t touched your Bible, I guarantee you have no idea what you are doing in your life. If you don’t know the word of God, I guarantee you will never make a right choice in your life. Quote me. I promise you.”

—Fr. Paul Guirgis

In some cases the hindrance to conscious blessedness lies not in sins, but in weights which hang around the soul. Sin is that which is always and everywhere wrong; but a weight is anything which may hinder or impede the Christian life, without being positively sin. And thus a thing may be a weight to one which is not so to another. Each must be fully persuaded in his own mind. And wherever the soul is aware of its life being hindered by the presence of only one thing, then, however harmless in itself, and however innocently permitted by others, there can be no alternative, but it must be cast aside…

The Gift of Suffering by F.B. Meyers

He willingly obeyed his conscience and did all it suggested without thought, as though it were a command of God Himself. He never went to bed with his conscience reproaching him: why did you not do this or that? Thus he always listened to his conscience, never leaving undone whatever it suggested to him. And every day his conscience added more and more to his usual rule.

On faith; and to those who say that those in the world cannot attain perfection virtues by St. Simeon the New Theologian

“A man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture.”

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

The truth is, there is not a knowledge gap in people’s minds today. People basically know what to do…and yet, we buy book after book and listen to guru after guru because we think they’re going to tell us a magic secret. There is no magic secret. The only thing we need to know is not what to do—we already know what to do—what we need is to figure out why we don’t do the things that we know we should.

—Nir Eyal

Thomas Carlyle, great Victorian, came one day home from the Church on a Sunday morning in a bad temper and he said to his mother: “I cannot think why they preach such a long sermon. If I were a minister, I would go up into the pulpit and say no more than this: Good people, you know what you ought to do, now go and do it!”

Discovering the Inner Kingdom by Bishop Kallistos Ware

All of a sudden, something began to stir within me, something began to push me, to prompt me. It was a movement that spoke like a voice.

“What are you waiting for?” it said. “Why are you sitting here? Why do you still hesitate? You know what you ought to do? Why don’t you do it?“

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain