I’ve noticed that you always want to drop one thing to hurry on to the next. Yet each task takes you far too much time to finish because you dissect everything far too much. You are not slow—just long-winded. You want to say everything that has the slightest connection to the subject at hand. This always takes too long and causes you to rush from one thing to another.
Try to be brief. Learn to get to the heart of the matter and disregard the nonessential. Don’t spend all your time musing! What you really need to do is sit quietly before God and your active argumentative mind would soon be calmed. God can teach you to look at each matter with a simple, clear view. You could say what you mean in two words! And as you think and speak less, you will be less excitable and distracted. Otherwise, you will wear yourself out, and external thing will overpower your inward life as well as your health.
Cut all this activity short! Silence yourself inwardly. Come back to your Lord often. You will get more accomplished this way. It is more important to listen to God than to your own thoughts.
—François Fénelon, The Seeking Heart
Category: BEST OF
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Think little and do much. If you are not careful, you will acquire so much knowledge that you will need another lifetime to put it all into practice.
—François Fénelon, The Seeking Heart -
33. Discard any possessions that you can’t discuss with passion.
…As long as we stick to owning things that we really love, we aren’t likely to want more.
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We also fool ourselves with the stories we tell ourselves. When I was in my late teens, I wanted to own a Jeep. I imagined myself cruising around with the roof and doors off. I couldn’t imagine a cooler or more fun vehicle to own (with the exception of maybe a Corvette Stingray). An older friend of mine at the time, who had once owned a Jeep, told me “it’s more fun watching someone else drive a Jeep than it is to drive one yourself.” I later found out he was right.
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“Appreciate without possessing.”
—Brittany Murphy -
Therefore, meditating upon these things, and considering how great is the reward for a painful and toilsome life, rejoice and be glad, since from your youth you have trod a path full of a myriad of crowns, making profit through your continual and multitudinous sufferings. For bodily infirmity, in all its various forms, is more grievous than a myriad of deaths, since without ceasing it continually beleaguers you. Being showered with abuses and outrages; bearing calumnies against yourself without a pause; being overwhelmed with continual, extreme sadness; and having fountains of tears throughout all this time-each one of these trials is sufficient by itself to procure great advantage to those who endure such things patiently.
—Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia
SO GOOD QUOTES 