Conversations are the basis of relationships, and relationships are built on trust. You will find that the more open you are about the limitations of your knowledge, the more weight people will give to your opinion when you offer it. If you don’t know something, just say “I don’t know.” Those three words can strengthen the bond between you and another person. And just as important, they are a gateway to further exploration and growth. You can’t learn unless you admit that you have something to learn.
We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter
Celeste Headlee
Category: KNOWLEDGE & SELF-KNOWLEDGE
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Among the items that waste time is for the mind to replay what it saw during the day. It finds audiovisual flashbacks of the entire past: discussions, images, actions, meetings, and conversations, as well as the mind’s consequent inferences— this consumes a great amount of time.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Monastic Treasures for All of Us -
God also knows what help matches each personality. And so it’s important for you to seek God as you are, because God will respond to you as you are. He’ll always move you towards truth, but He’s not gonna be like, Well, here’s the thing, bro, you need to now take a vow of silence. But you’re like Moses, and you just want to laugh and chill with people, you’re not Arsenius. Cool, right? He does do that.
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It is a grace. It is not that person’s intellect—it is God has gifted them of seeing with real sight — he graced them, he gifted them with something that doesn’t belong to them by nature.
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He arranges for the afflictions which make a man think of giving up the world. Then He teaches him that there is an inward renunciation to be made, as well as the outward. “And when thou deemest thyself to have done all by renouncing, the Lord taketh account with thee. ‘Why dost thou boast? Did not I create thy body and thy soul? Did not I make the gold and silver? What hast thou done?’ The soul begins to make confession, and to beseech the Lord and say, ‘All things are Thine. The house I am in is Thine. My clothes are Thine. From Thee is my food, and of Thee am I supplied for every need.’
Fifty Spiritual Homilies of Saint Macarius the Egyptian
Introduction
A.J. MASON, D.D. -
It is a natural and holy impulse which makes a believer wish to impart to others the word which has proved helpful to himself; and Macarius draws an unfavourable picture of the man who is so intoxicated with the revelations made to him that he is unable to think of the needs of others or to minister the word to them (VIII. 4). But he has heart-searching things to say about those who attempt to edify others by “words borrowed from various parts of the Bible” without having themselves the experience of their spiritual force (XVIII.
Fifty Spiritual Homilies of Saint Macarius the Egyptian
Introduction
A.J. MASON, D.D. -
Let us suppose that you want God to save you from the habit of being quick-tempered. If you have read influential books by the most famous psychologists, and have made use of unfailing exercises, and have strengthened your determination to the uttermost, yet have not asked for the grace and help of God, you will certainly fail. Nevertheless, if you abide by the following steps, the Lord, through His grace, will crown your struggle with success.
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Pray -
“You were within me, but I was outside myself.”
—St. Augustine -
“He alone knows himself in the best way possible who thinks of himself as being nothing.”
—St. John Chrysostom
SO GOOD QUOTES 