Category: ANGER

  • Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up. If we love each other enough, we will bear with each other’s faults and burdens. If we love enough, we are going to light that fire in the hearts of others. And it is love that will burn out the sins and hatreds that sadden us. It is love that will make us want to do great things for each other. No sacrifice and no suffering will then seem too much. Yes, I see only too clearly how bad people are. I wish I did not see it so. It is my own sins that give me such clarity.

    —Dorothy Day

  • Do not say, I have given you much advice, but it’s useless; you should have long-suffering.

    Hearken to the apostle, saying, “…uphold the weak, be patient with all” (1 Thess. 5:14). Overcoming a deep-rooted struggle needs time and patience, so be patient with the weak until God’s grace visits and delivers them. Remember that you also have a similar nature, and put before you the words of the apostle, “Remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering” (Heb. 13:3).

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Life of Hope

  • “Do not offend others, even in your thoughts.”

    — Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica

  • In Ephesians 4:25, Saint Paul says, “Therefore, putting away lying, let each one of you speak truth with his neighbor.” If I come to ask if you are upset with me, and you answer, “No, nothing is wrong,” but in your heart you are upset, then you are lying. If I ask you if something is wrong, you could answer, “Yes, actually something is bothering me.” The verse continues, “For we are members of one another. Be angry, and do not sin.”

    —H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, Inner Healing

  • Long-suffering and readiness to forgive curb anger; love and compassion wither it. 

    —St. Thalassios the Libyan, On Love, Self-control and Life
    in Accordance with the Intellect

  • Even if our mother or father or brother or sister or spouse or friend couldn’t love us in every way we might have liked, Père Thomas began to show me that each one did reflect an aspect of God’s love, and when taken together they reflected the fullness of God in a way I had often missed in focusing on what each one was not able to offer.

    —Henri Nouwen, Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life

    However bad it may be at home, anyway they are your father and mother, and not enemies, strangers. Once a year at least, they’ll show their love of you.

    —Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    Remember people’s love for you and their good past with you, whenever you are fought by doubts of their sincerity and whenever you see them erring against you, for then their past love will intercede for them and your anger will subside.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III

    I felt miserable because I had failed so many times in the past to respond to her help, to accept the warmth and love she tried to give me. Another wave of loneliness overcame me as I considered the times when I fought her, hated her, and pushed her away from me.

    …

    This was my mother; the word “mother” brings on a flow of feeling and past experiences and years of living together, loving together, and hating, too. The fighting and conflicts do not seem important anymore, the arguments and intense pains and emotions that clouded the relationship have evaporated. This was my mother, and I realize the uniqueness of our relationship.

    …

    In her dying, I was able to become open to myself and to my mother, to claim our relationship, to look back upon the past in quick moments while at her bedside and realize the times she did give me warmth and love, and the times when pain and emotional conflict blocked the giving and the receiving.

    —Clark E. Moustakas, Loneliness

    Even if some people are foul and have reached the extremes of evil, often they have done one or two or three good things…. We ought to suspect the same also in the case of good people. Just as the most worthless people often do something good, so those who are earnest and virtuous often fail completely in some other respect.

    —St. John Chrysostom, On Wealth and Poverty

  • “I tried never to go to sleep while I kept a grievance against anyone. Nor did I let anyone go to sleep while he had a grievance against me.”

    —Agatho

    The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks
    Benedicta Ward

  • I have seen people flaring up madly and vomiting their long-stored malice, who by their very passion were delivered from passion, and who have obtained from their offender either penitence or an explanation of the long standing grievance. I have seen others who seemed to show a brute patience, but who were nourishing resentment within them under the cover of silence.

    —St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent

  • “Bear with everyone as God bears with you.”

    —Abba Ammon

  • We’ve all seen little kids lash out at each other and then five minutes later be playing together happily. Sadly, we the parents of those kids hold our grudges a lot longer.

    —Fr. Stavros Akrotirianakis