However great your knowledge may be, you cannot understand as long as you do not love. Love is much nobler than intellect. The logic of love is much more sublime than that of the intellect.
…
Human beings have more knowledge than wisdom. Their theories have become in their minds like the fog on the mountains and in the valleys; they prevent them from seeing things as they are. Their theories rob them of sight.
—St. Charbel, Love is a Radiant Light
Category: KNOWLEDGE & SELF-KNOWLEDGE
-
-
Humble knowledge of self is a surer path to God than the ardent pursuit of learning. Not that learning is to be considered evil, or knowledge, which is good in itself and so ordained by God; but a clean conscience and virtuous life ought always to be preferred. Many often err and accomplish little or nothing because they try to become learned rather than to live well.
—Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ -
Think little and do much. If you are not careful, you will acquire so much knowledge that you will need another lifetime to put it all into practice.
—François Fénelon, The Seeking Heart -
“Many often err and accomplish little or nothing because they try to become learned rather than to live well.”
-
Give me any instance then of a man as wise as you can fancy him possible to be, that has spent all his younger years in poring upon books, and trudging after learning, in the pursuit whereof he squanders away the pleasantest time of his life in watching, sweat, and fasting; and in his latter days he never tastes one mouthful of delight, but is always stingy, poor, dejected, melancholy, burthensome to himself, and unwelcome to others, pale, lean, thin-jawed, sickly, contracting by his sedentariness such hurtful distempers as bring him to an untimely death, like roses plucked before they shatter. Thus have you, the draught of a wise man’s happiness, more the object of a commiserating pity, than of an ambitioning envy.
In Praise of Folly
Erasmus -
Make me worthy, O Lord, to know you and love you, not with knowledge arising from studies and exercise to the intellect’s dispersion, but make me worthy of that knowledge whereby the intellect, in beholding you, glorifies your nature in divine vision which steals the awareness of the world from the mind.
—St Isaac the Syrian [Homilies 36, “On the Modes of Virtue,” in The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, p 161]
-
But underneath all our emphasis on successful action, many of us suffer from a deep-seated, low self-esteem and are walking around with the constant fear that someday someone will unmask the illusion and show that we are not as smart, as good, or as lovable as the world was made to believe.
—Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life -
Note the events of your life. Everything has deep meaning. You don’t understand them now, but later much will be revealed…
—Venerable Barsanuphius of Optina
SO GOOD QUOTES 