SO GOOD QUOTES

Category: BEST OF

  • 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

  • Make a rule never to speak to any one but your confessor either of your illusions or of your temptations.

    Letters of Elder Macarius of Optina

  • If you would wish to know the sure signs, which will secure you the real model, it is not hard to take a sketch from life. If you see a man so standing between death and life, as to select from each helps for the contemplative course, never letting death’s stupor paralyze his zeal to keep all the commandments, nor yet placing both feet in the world of the living, since he has weaned himself from secular ambitions—a man who remains more insensate than the dead themselves to everything that is found on examination to be living for the flesh, but instinct with life and energy and strength in the achievements of virtue, which are the sure marks of the spiritual life-then look to that man for the rule of your life; let him be the leading light of your course of devotion, as the constellations that never set are to the pilot; imitate his youth and his gray hairs: or, rather, imitate the old man and the stripling who are joined in him; 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, or rather an exchange of the peculiar qualities of each; for in age he shows, in the direction of the good, a young man’s energy, while, in the hours of youth, in the direction of evil, his passions were powerless.

    If you wish to know what were the passions of that glorious youth of his, you will have for your imitation the intensity and glow of his godlike love of wisdom, which grew with him from his childhood, and has continued with him into his old age. But if you cannot gaze upon him, as the weak-sighted cannot gaze upon the sun, at all events watch that band of holy men who are ranged beneath him, and who by the illumination of their lives are a model for this age. God has placed them as a beacon for us who live around; many among them have been young men there in their prime, and have grown gray in the unbroken practice of continence and temperance; they were old in reasonableness before their time, and in character outstripped their years.

    —Saint Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity

  • HESITATION

    Hesitation is a psychological disease or a weakness in the
    personality.

    St. James, the Apostle, says, “He is a double-minded man,
    unstable in all his ways.” (James 1:8).

    The one who hesitates might say I am thinking and studying.
    But there is a big difference between thinking in depth and
    being hesitant.

    There is a difference between the one who studies in depth and the one who, after deciding on one thing, changes his mind to another then goes back to the first one and leaves it later on, without settling on any.

    Maybe hesitation is due to fear and fear has its reasons. It
    could be the fear of failure or acting wrongly that is causing
    hesitation. It could be fear because of weakness and
    incapability, or the fear of results and responsibility. It could
    also be the fear of choosing badly and more than one solution is being offered.

    As one in cross-roads, afraid of choosing a road that gets him lost!

    Hesitation could also be due to lack of self-confidence.
    Maybe the hesitant is one who is not used to depend on himself and has no self-confidence.

    Therefore, he does not trust his thinking, his decision or his
    good choice. He also does not trust his capability. He has no
    experience to trust in himself. Maybe he lacks the knowledge
    to trust in himself. He is the image of a man.

    The reason for hesitation could also be for lack in courage and valour.

    He is unable to make a decision. Every time he progresses, his courage fails him. Usually, his will would be weak. Whenever he decides on a matter, he finds that everything looks the same and fails to choose one. He is not sure of the results and maybe of the means also.

    Hesitation causes confusion, maybe due to lack of
    understanding.

    He may have two matters, both are good. But which one is
    better? Or both are bad, but which one is less bad? Or maybe
    he is faced with a matter that he does not know if it is good or
    bad? The vision is blurred.

    The reason for hesitation could also be due to many advisers
    and consultants.

    He who has one adviser finds it easy to take one path. As for
    the one who asks many, there is a chance each of them leads
    him to a way different from the other, or gives him advice that
    contradicts that of another. Therefore, he stands hesitantly
    between contradicting advice, not knowing which is better.

    Contradictory readings could also be the cause of his confused thinking

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Words of Spiritual Benefit Vol. IV

  • How true is the saying, “The road to hell is full of excuses!”

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Words of Spiritual Benefit Vol. 1

  • “You will always be able to tell your parents or siblings or close friends’ voices even if you can’t see them or they are really far away. If you love someone, you can easily recognize their voice. Can you say the same for Christ? Do you know His voice? You must be able to recognize God’s voice even if you can’t see Him.”

    —Fr. Bishoy El Antony

  • “A bad word makes even good people bad, but a good word turns even bad people into good.”

    +Saint Macarius of Egypt

  • “For I have often seen people who had offended God and were not in the least perturbed about it. And I have seen how those same people provoked their friends in some trifling matter and then employed every artifice, every device, every sacrifice, every apology, both personally and through friends and relatives, not sparing gifts, in order to regain their former love.”

    — St. John Climacus

  • He talks about healing a wound, and does not stop irritating it. He complains of sickness, and does not stop eating what is harmful. He prays against it, and immediately goes and does it. And when he has done it, he is angry with himself; and the wretched man is not ashamed of his own words. “I am doing wrong,” he cries, and eagerly continues to do so. His mouth prays against his passion, and his body struggles for it. He philosophizes about death, but he behaves as if he were immortal. He groans over the separation of soul and body, but drowses along as if he were eternal. He talks of temperance and self-control, but he lives for gluttony. He reads about the judgment and begins to smile. He reads about vainglory, and is vainglorious while actually reading. He repeats what he has learned about vigil, and drops asleep on the spot. He praises prayer, but runs from it as from the plague. He blesses obedience, but he is the first to disobey. He praises detachment, but he is not ashamed to be spiteful and to fight for a rag. When angered he gets bitter, and he is angered again at his bitterness; and he does not feel that after one defeat he is suffering another. Having overeaten he repents, and a little later again gives way to it. He blesses silence, and praises it with a spate of words. He teaches meekness, and during the actual teaching frequently gets angry. Having woken from passion he sighs, and shaking his head, he again yields to passion. He condemns laughter, and lectures on mourning with a smile on his face. Before others he blames himself for being vainglorious, and in blaming himself is only angling for glory for himself. He looks people in the face with passion, and talks about chastity. While frequenting the world, he praises the solitary life, without realizing that he shames himself. He extols almsgivers, and reviles beggars. All the time he is his own accuser, and he does not want to come to his senses—I will not say cannot.

    —St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent

  • “Sometimes what serves as a medicine for one is poison for another; and sometimes something given to one and the same person at a suitable time serves as a medicine, but at the wrong time it is a poison.”

    —St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent