SO GOOD QUOTES

Category: BEST OF

  • How can you find out if you are living within the will of God? Here is the sign: If you are troubled about anything, this means that you have not completely given yourself over to the will of God. A person who lives in the will of God is not concerned over anything. And if he needs anything, he gives both it and himself over to God. And if he does not receive the necessary thing, he remains calm nevertheless, as if he had it. The soul which has been given over to the will of God is afraid of nothing, not of thunder nor of thieves – nothing. But whatever happens, she says, “Thus it pleases God.” If she is sick, she thinks: this means that I need to be sick, or else God would not have given it to me. Thus peace is preserved in both soul and body. 

    —St. Silouan the Athonite

  • There is scarce any one who desires to serve God, but does so for selfish reasons; we expect gain and not loss, consolation and not suffering, riches and not poverty, increase and not diminution. But the whole interior work is of an opposite character; to be lost, sacrificed, made less than nothing, and despoiled of an excessive delight, even in the gifts of God, that we may be forced to cling to Him alone.

    —Francois Fenelon, Spiritual Progress

  • You should dwell on something exactly to the point that dwelling on it further doesn’t do you any good.

    —Bret Weinstein

  • “He was looking for joy and found the Cross. What remedy is there for his sadness? He must rediscover the spirit of poverty. A rich person is someone who expects everything. A poor person is someone for whom everything is a gift. Nothing is owed us, not even our existence. ‘What do you have that you have not received?’ Friendship, happiness, joy are not owed us.”

    —Jean-Yves Leloup, Being Still

  • Remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering.

    —Sally Rooney

  • “Do the next thing.” I don’t know any simpler formula for peace, for relief from stress and anxiety than that very practical, very down-to-earth word of wisdom. Do the next thing. That has gotten me through more agonies than anything else I could recommend.

    ―Elisabeth Elliot, Suffering Is Never for Nothing

  • “Suffering passes. . . to suffer well lasts an eternity”

    —St. Thérèse of Lisieux

  • Woe to our times: we now depart from the narrow and sorrowful path leading to eternal life and we seek a happy and peaceful path. But the merciful Lord leads many people from this path, against their will, and places them on the sorrowful one. Through unwanted sorrows and illnesses we draw closer to the Lord, for they humble us by constraint, and humility, when we acquire it, can save us even without works, according to St. Isaac the Syrian.

    —St. Macarius of Optina

  • “At times, our lives will be turned upside down with nothing to support us but our decision to keep in the goodness and faithfulness of God. Even many of the great saints were left without answers to their cries. St. Antony the Great questioned God about all the injustices of the world and Gods reply to him was, ‘Antony, keep your attention on yourself; these things are according to the judgment of God, and it is not to your advantage to know anything about them.””

    All That I Have Is Yours: 100 Meditations with St. Pope Kyrillos VI on the Spiritual Life
    Fr. Kyrillos Ibrahim

  • “Reality is irrelevant; Perception is everything.”

    —Terry Goodkind