Category: BEST OF

  • “It seems we don’t know how to love the ones we love until they disappear from our lives.”

    —Joshua Fields Millburn, Everything That Remains: A Memoir by The Minimalists

  • You can’t resent other people because you let yourself down. But you can try.

    —John Tottenham

  • We all have value. 

    We all contribute. We all give back—if not through paid work, then as part of the human ecosystem. 

    “All Parasites Have Value:” Why Valuing Those Who Don’t Work is Key to More Sustainable Work Practices for Those Who Do

  • “Could I too choose to make the pain stop by staying busy? Eventually, the action was over and everyone had to go home. There is always a point when the doing ends, and then we are faced with the deafening and horrendous silence that is our thoughts.”

    —Joe Watson Jr., The End of Despair

  • What is this whole world, with all its continents, its past, present, and future? What does it amount to? Nothing! I resonate with a statement from one scholar who once said: “When I was a child I saw myself in comparison to the world as a small speck of sand on an endless beach of an endless ocean.” So what if someone lives in any given city within a specific country, which is part of a specific continent, which in turn is a small part of planet Earth, itself just one of innumerable planets? What would that mean? It is nothing. What does this person turn out to be? He says: “When I was a child, I saw myself as a small speck of sand on an endless beach of an endless ocean, but now I know that I am the endless ocean and the whole world is a small speck of sand on my beach.” 

    One who sits to think of the world finds that it is frivolous. If you asked him, “What is the world?” he would say, “A small speck of sand on my beach.” And if you asked, “What is your endless beach?” he would reply, “This is the beach leading to eternity.” If you see yourself as the image and likeness of God, then what does this world amount to? With all its noise, struggles, desires, and status, what does the world amount to? Nothing. This is a person’s valuation of the world.


    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Monastic Treasures for All of Us

  • The person who really knows what’s going on, a lot of times, you find him more reserved.

    —Fr. Mina Dimitri

  • ”Only struggle a little more. Carry your cross without complaining. Don’t think you are anything special. Don’t justify your sins and weaknesses, but see yourself as you really are. And, especially, love one another.”

    —Fr. Seraphim Rose

  • for even now in his declining years, time has not blunted the keen activity of his soul, nor was his youth active in the sphere of youth’s well-known employments; in both seasons of life he has shown a wonderful combination of opposites

    —Saint Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity

  • Some call men intelligent because they have the power of discernment on the sensible plane. But the really intelligent people are those who control their own desires.

    —St Mark the Ascetic

  • “The ineloquent man was wiser than the wise.”

    —Saint John Chrysostom, On the Vanity of Riches
    HOMILY Two
    After Eutropios, having been found outside the church, was taken captive