“The love of God is not taught. No one has taught us to enjoy the light or to be attached to life more than anything else. And no one has taught us to love the two people who brought us into the world and educated us. Which is all the more reason to believe that we did not learn to love God as a result of outside instruction.”
—St. Basil the Great
Category: FAITH
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There is no better teacher than death. Have death before your minds: the time when you will leave this unreal world and will go to the other one, which is eternal.
—St. Cosmas Aitolos -
“Remember always: if your way of life is hard and sorrowful, it is correct; but if you live in comfort, wealth and honour, and still more, in carnal pleasures, you are on the road to perdition. It is quite impossible to attain serenity of mind without enduring many sorrows and depression and for many years.”
—Father Ilian of Mount Athos -
“He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory -
Some things have to be believed to be seen.
—Laurel Lee -
And he advised her thus: “Never give up the church, never stay away from the Communion. For these things happened to you because you did not attend the mysteries for five weeks.”
—Palladius, The Lausiac History , CHAPTER XVII. — MACARIUS OF EGYPT 112 -
“Nothing ever happens either in the world or in the universe without the will of God or His permission. All that is good and noble is God’s will, and all that is negative and bad happens because He allows it. He knows why He allows these things to happen and for how long. If the incorporeal angelic powers or we men were allowed to do as we please, there would be total chaos in the world and in the entire universe. But God is present everywhere and He is Light, a Light that penetrates all.”
—Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica -
When Dr. Payson was asked by a friend, in a season of severe illness, if he could see any particular reason for the present dispensation, he replied- “No; but I am as well satisfied as if I could see ten thousand. God’s will is the very perfection of all reason.”
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in suffering and weakness, you are brought to “Lie passive in His hands, And know no will but His!”
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The discipline of patience is another light blending with the shadows of sickness. No unimportant or untimely grace of the Spirit is this; the development and culture of which finds no school more appropriate, or discipline more effectual, than that of ‘pining sickness.’
The continuous endurance of unmitigated pain- the prolonged and deathly weakness- the failure of skill and remedies to promote a cure- the morbid irritability and fretting almost inseparable from the prolongation of suffering- and the remembrance of duties neglected, of affairs deranged, of expenses incurred- all conspire to render the discipline of patience the most needed and precious; and when attained, to shed one of the most luminous graces of the Spirit upon the shaded picture of bodily disease.
Lights and Shadows of Spiritual Life
Octavius Winslow
SO GOOD QUOTES 