Category: BEST OF

  • No one should forget: Eros (love) alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity.

    —Emil Cioran

  • Satan may allow us to talk about God for many hours, but he will never let us talk with Him, even for a few minutes.

    —Fr. Bishoy Kamel

  • “We may study as much as we will but we shall still not come to know the Lord unless we live according to His commandments, for the Lord is not made known through learning but by the Holy Spirit. Many philosophers and scholars have arrived at the belief in the existence of God. To believe in God is one thing, to know God is another.”

    — St. Silouan the Athonite

  • But the saint is never a philosopher; he has given up merely trying to understand, and asks only to be given what is given him; he has accepted the world, and there is no longer any question of its making “sense” or not.

    —Fr. Seraphim Rose

  • “When the day of judgement comes, we shall be examined about what we have done, not about what we have read.”

    —Thomas à Kempis

  • 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

  • Every wise person is intelligent, but not every intelligent person is wise.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Characteristics of the Spiritual Path

  • 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.

    Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism
    by Fumio Sasaki

  • 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.

    The Stories We Tell and Why