Category: KNOWLEDGE & SELF-KNOWLEDGE

  • He who opposes unpleasant events opposes the command of God unwittingly. But when someone accepts them with real knowledge, he ‘waits patiently for the Lord’ (Ps. 27:14).

    —St. Mark the Ascetic
    Philokalia, Vol. 1 p.142

  • “Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life.”

    —Wilma Rudolph

  • Frankl went on to say it wasn’t pleasure mankind was looking for, that men only sought pleasure when they couldn’t find meaning. If a man has no sense of meaning, Frankl argued, he will numb himself with pleasure.

    —Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy

  • “Those who have been humbled by their passions may take courage. For even if they fall into every pit and are trapped in all the snares and suffer all maladies, yet after their restoration to health they become physicians, beacons, lamps, and pilots for all, teaching us the habits of every disease and from their own personal experience able to prevent their neighbours from falling.”

    —St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent

  • Controlling your anger isn’t easy, but it’s the path to wisdom

    —Fr. Mina Dimitri

  • Sometimes our failure in dealing with certain people is due more to our ignorance of how to treat them, than to their personal faults.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Characteristics of the Spiritual Path

  • Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world.

    —May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

  • A lot of times, we think there is a problem in my life because of this or that. We rarely think that it’s my sins that are causing a problem. 

    It’s not my coworker, it’s not my life situation, it’s not my illness, not my family situation, or anything else; it’s my sins. My sins are making me incapable of dealing with this problem in a way that a true christian would deal with it. No matter your problems, no matter whose fault it is, it’s also always your fault. That’s the way a Christian thinks.

    —Fr. Seraphim Holland

  • “What we gain by fasting is not so great as the damage done by anger; nor is the profit from spiritual reading as great as the harm done when we scorn or grieve a brother.”

    —St. John Cassian

  • If you fall into some transgression, quickly turn to the realisation of your weakness and be aware of it. For God allows you to fall for the very purpose of making you more aware of your weakness, so that you may thus not only yourself learn to despise yourself, but because of your great weakness may wish to be despised also by others. Know that without such desire it is impossible for this beneficent self-disbelief to be born and take root in you. This is the foundation and beginning of true humility, since it is based on realisation, by experience, of your impotence and unreliability. 

    From this, each of us sees how necessary it is for a man, who desires to participate in heavenly light, to know himself, and how God’s mercy usually leads the proud and self-reliant to this knowledge through their downfalls, justly allowing them to fall into the very sin from which they think they are strong enough to protect themselves, so as to make them see their weakness and prevent them from relying foolhardily on themselves either in this or in anything else. 

    Unseen Warfare
    Lorenzo Scupoli