Category: KNOWLEDGE & SELF-KNOWLEDGE

  • Some put in their mind a specific idea that they have already decided on, then read to search for a verse to confirm what they have made up their mind about. Or they try to subjugate what is written in the Bible to their own thoughts. As for you, do not be like that, but read to learn and to know.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, The Spiritual Means

  • Perhaps you look too much inwards on self, instead of outwards on the Lord Jesus.—The healthiest people do not think about their health; the weak induce disease by morbid introspection. If you begin to count your heartbeats, you will disturb the rhythmic action of the heart. If you continually imagine a pain anywhere, you will produce it. And there are some true children of God who induce their own darkness by morbid self-scrutiny. They are always going back on themselves, analyzing their motives, re-considering past acts of consecration, or comparing themselves with themselves. In one form or another self is the pivot of their life, albeit that it is undoubtedly a religious life. What but darkness can result from such a course? There are certainly times in our lives when we must look within, and judge ourselves, that we may not be judged. But this is only done that we may turn with fuller purpose of heart to the Lord. And when once done, it needs not to be repeated. “Leaving the things behind” is the only safe motto. The question is, not whether we did as well as we might, but whether we did as well as we could at the time.

    We must not spend all our lives in cleaning our windows, or in considering whether they are clean, but in sunning ourselves in God’s blessed light. That light will soon show us what still needs to be cleansed away, and will enable us to cleanse it with unerring accuracy.

    The Gift of Suffering
    by F.B. Meyer

  • If God were attainable with the intelligence, how unjust it would be! It would have made easy the task of the wise and the great of this world, and would have made knowledge of God all but impossible for the little ones, the poor, and the ignorant. But God himself has found the way to be equally accessible to everybody. His revelation comes in love, in that faculty which we can all share.

    Letters from the Desert
    by Carlo Carretto

  • I thought that in prayer everything depended on me and my efforts, on the books passing through my hands, and the beauty of the words which I was able to introduce into my conversations with God. What is worse, I thought the knowledge of God I was acquiring through study and reasoning was the real and only one. I hadn’t yet understood that it was only an image, a covering, an introduction to God’s true and authentic revelation, which is supernatural and eternal.

    Letters from the Desert
    by Carlo Carretto

  • Even the love of study can make people unbelievably selfish; the passion for research can make men as mad and blind as termites in their dark tunnel.

    Letters from the Desert
    by Carlo Carretto

  • “Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know. ”

    —Pema Chödrön

  • Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation.

    Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau

  • There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff. Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, It shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life. He proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it should not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in their works and died, but he grew not older by a moment. His singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth. As he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him.

    Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau

  • He told me, with the utmost simplicity and truth, quite superior, or rather inferior, to anything that is called humility, that he was “deficient in intellect.” These were his words. The Lord had made him so, yet he supposed the Lord cared as much for him as for another. “I have always been so,” said he, “from my childhood; I never had much mind; I was not like other children; I am weak in the head. It was the Lord’s will, I suppose.”

    Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau

  • It would have suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with him. To a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general; yet I sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and I did not know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity.

    Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau