Category: KNOWLEDGE & SELF-KNOWLEDGE

  • Worship must come from a pure heart. Likewise, if purity of heart does not precede the life of solitude, it turns from solitude into introversion, from a means of worship to the goal of fleeing from people, or intolerance of people, or as one of the fathers put it, “Such a person spends a hundred years in his cell, and does not even learn how one should sit.” Therefore, we need to place purity of heart as the primary goal before us. Purity of heart requires you to search yourself, know your mistakes, and work on them.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Monastic Treasures for All of Us

  • “The greater the intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.”

    —Blaise Pascal, Pensées

  • “As you approach the truth, your solitude will increase.”

    —Michel Houellebecq, TO STAY ALIVE

  • The closer people are to the truth, the more tolerant they are of the mistakes of others.

    —Leo Tolstoy

  • To Abba Pambo, who asked him, “What ought I to do?”  the old man said: “Do not trust in your own righteousness, do not worry about the past, but control your tongue and your stomach.”

    The Way of the Heart: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers
    Henri Nouwen

  • Do not say, I have given you much advice, but it’s useless; you should have long-suffering.

    Hearken to the apostle, saying, “…uphold the weak, be patient with all” (1 Thess. 5:14). Overcoming a deep-rooted struggle needs time and patience, so be patient with the weak until God’s grace visits and delivers them. Remember that you also have a similar nature, and put before you the words of the apostle, “Remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering” (Heb. 13:3).

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Life of Hope

  • If God is really trying to tell you something, it will not only be in one way at one time. He’s not going to be limited by whether you got the memo [or not].

    —Fr. Antony Paul

  • He was full of wisdom, advanced in age; and we know that silence is the trait of the wise. After three years had passed, through which he persisted in asking God to help him that he may be saved, he heard a voice saying to him, “Flee, keep silence, and be still.”37 And these three words are suitable, as an approach, for all. For when you are surrounded by troubles, when you feel unsure toward something, when you need to take a critical decision, or when you are approaching a new stage [in your life], do this: “Flee, keep silence, and be still.”

    Abba Arsenius The Tutor of the Emperor’s Sons
    book by Bishop Macarius

  • If you would wish to know the sure signs, which will secure you the real model, it is not hard to take a sketch from life. If you see a man so standing between death and life, as to select from each helps for the contemplative course, never letting death’s stupor paralyze his zeal to keep all the commandments, nor yet placing both feet in the world of the living, since he has weaned himself from secular ambitions—a man who remains more insensate than the dead themselves to everything that is found on examination to be living for the flesh, but instinct with life and energy and strength in the achievements of virtue, which are the sure marks of the spiritual life-then look to that man for the rule of your life; let him be the leading light of your course of devotion, as the constellations that never set are to the pilot; imitate his youth and his gray hairs: or, rather, imitate the old man and the stripling who are joined in him; for even now in his declining years, time has not blunted the keen activity of his soul, nor was his youth active in the sphere of youth’s well-known employments; in both seasons of life he has shown a wonderful combination of opposites, or rather an exchange of the peculiar qualities of each; for in age he shows, in the direction of the good, a young man’s energy, while, in the hours of youth, in the direction of evil, his passions were powerless.

    If you wish to know what were the passions of that glorious youth of his, you will have for your imitation the intensity and glow of his godlike love of wisdom, which grew with him from his childhood, and has continued with him into his old age. But if you cannot gaze upon him, as the weak-sighted cannot gaze upon the sun, at all events watch that band of holy men who are ranged beneath him, and who by the illumination of their lives are a model for this age. God has placed them as a beacon for us who live around; many among them have been young men there in their prime, and have grown gray in the unbroken practice of continence and temperance; they were old in reasonableness before their time, and in character outstripped their years.

    —Saint Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity

  • Our first intuitions are the true ones. What I thought of so many things in my first youth seems to me increasingly right, and after so many detours and distractions, I now come back to it, aggrieved that I could have erected my existence on the ruin of those revelations.

    —Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born