Humility is acquired after struggles. When you know yourself you acquire humility, which becomes a (permanent) condition. Otherwise you can become humble for a moment, but your thought will say to you that you are something, although in reality you’re nothing; and you’ll be deluded like that to the moment of death. If death finds you with the thought that you are nothing, then God will speak. If, however, your thought says at the hour of death that you are something and you don’t understand it, all your effort goes to waste.
—St Paisios of Mount Athos
Category: HUMILITY
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If you fall under discipline, know for sure that this is a great profit, for God chastises the soul that has forgotten its weakness and has been puffed up by its talents and success. This is carried on until it realizes its weakness, especially when God does not provide in tribulation a way of escape. He besieges the soul from all sides and embitters it with inward and outward humiliation, whether by sin or by scandal, until it abhors itself, curses its own intelligence, and disowns its counsel. Finally, it surrenders itself to God, feeling crushed and lowly. At such a time, it becomes easy for man to hate himself. He even wishes it to be hated by everybody. This is the way of true humility. It leads to total surrender to divine plan. It ends up with freeing one’s soul from the tyranny of the ego, with its deception, its stubbornness, and its vanity.
—Matthew the Poor, Orthodox Prayer Life -
165. Do good to one who wrongs you, and God will be your friend. Never slander your enemy. Practice love, restraint and moderation, patience, self-control and the like. For this is knowledge of God: to follow Him through humility and other such virtues. These are the actions not of every man, but of one whose soul possesses spiritual understanding.
—St Anthony the Great
On the Character of Men and on the Virtuous Life
One Hundred and Seventy Texts -
90. The man who lives devoutly does not allow evil to slip into his soul; and, no evil being present, his soul is safe from danger and harm. Such a man is dominated neither by demon nor by fate, for God delivers him from all evil and, protected like a god, he lives unharmed. If he is praised, he laughs within himself at those who praise him; if he is execrated, he does not defend himself against those who mock him, and he never gets angry at what they say.
—St Anthony the Great
On the Character of Men and on the Virtuous Life
One Hundred and Seventy Texts -
75. We can choose to live with self-discipline, but we cannot become wealthy simply by an act of choice. Must we then condemn our soul by pursuing or even desiring a wealth which we cannot acquire by an act of choice, and which in any case is but a short-lived fantasy? How foolishly we act, not realizing that the first of all the virtues is humility, just as the first of all the passions is gluttony and desire for worldly things,
—St Anthony the Great
On the Character of Men and on the Virtuous Life
One Hundred and Seventy Texts -
“He alone knows himself in the best way possible who thinks of himself as being nothing.”
—St. John Chrysostom -
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.
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I reminded him of all the people who love him and all the people he’s loved. I told him I thought it was unfair for a man to be judged by a moment, by a season. We are all more complicated than that. Certainly my friend will have to face the consequences of his actions, and those consequences will be severe. He is being pruned, as it were. His limbs are being cut back. But I hope he doesn’t live into his failures the way so many people do.
—Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy
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A continuously happy life produces extremely unhappy consequences. In nature we see that there are not always pleasant springs and fruitful summers, and sometimes autumn is rainy and winter cold and snowy, and there is flooding and wind and storms, and moreover the crops fail and there are famine, troubles, sicknesses and many other misfortunes. All of this is beneficial so that man might learn through prudence, patience and humility. For the most part, in times of plenty he forgets himself, but in times of various sorrows he becomes more attentive to his salvation.
SO GOOD QUOTES 