Category: KNOWLEDGE & SELF-KNOWLEDGE

  • Now while the blood is hot you should make your way with vigor to better things. In this kind of life you will find much that is worth your study: the love and practice of the virtues, the forgetfulness of the passions, the knowledge of how to live and die, and a life of deep tranquility.

    Indeed the state of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but the most wretched are those who are toiling not even at their own preoccupations, but must regulate their sleep by another’s, and their walk by another’s pace, and obey order in those freest of all things, loving and hating. If such people want to know how short their lives are, let them reflect how small a portion is their own.

    So, when you see a man repeatedly wearing the robe of office, or one whose name is often spoken in the Forum, do not envy him: these things are won at the cost of life.

    —Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

  • “There are only two people who can tell you the truth about yourself – an enemy who has lost his temper and a friend who loves you dearly.”

    —Antisthenes

  • In writing down my thought, it sometimes escapes me; but this makes me remember my weakness, that I constantly forget. This is as instructive to me as my forgotten thought; for I strive only to know my nothingness.

    —Blaise Pascal, Pensées

  • “If a schoolchild receives a lesson that two plus two is four year after year, but after ten years still cannot solve this simple problem, something is wrong. And if a Christian thinks of himself as still a novice ten or fifteen years after entering the Body of Christ, if year after year he still cannot fast because he is too busy trying not to devour his neighbor (at least, that is the excuse), then he should rethink his strategy. There is a strategy, right?”

    —Fr. Sergei Sveshnikov

  • “No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else.”

    —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  • “The love of God is not taught. No one has taught us to enjoy the light or to be attached to life more than anything else. And no one has taught us to love the two people who brought us into the world and educated us. Which is all the more reason to believe that we did not learn to love God as a result of outside instruction.”

    —St. Basil the Great

  • ​​“We cannot have trust in someone whom we know only superficially. We must know this someone, we must have created a relationship with him. In the end it is necessary to love this someone in order to have confidence in him. Our knowledge of God does not come from books, nor is it the result of reflection. To arrive at knowledge of God, it is necessary to cultivate a relationship with Him. We do not know God as an idea, as the result of a process of thought. It is something else entirely: God is known through an immediate relationship, and it is this which we must seek.”

    —Alexander Schmemann

  • In your life, you will be evaluated on your output. Your boss will evaluate you on your output. If you’re a writer like me, the audience will evaluate you on your output.

    But your input is just as important. If you don’t have good input, you cannot maintain good output.

    The problem is no one manages your input. The boss never cares about your input. The boss doesn’t care about what books you read. Your boss doesn’t ask you what newspapers you read. The boss doesn’t ask you what movies you saw or what TV shows or what ideas you consume.

    But I know for a fact I could not do what I do if I was not zealous in managing high-quality inputs into my mind every day of my life. That’s why I spend maybe two hours a day writing. I’m a writer. I spend two hours a day writing, but I spend three to four hours a day reading and two to three hours a day listening to music.

    People think that that’s creating a problem in my schedule, but in fact, I say, “No, no, this is the reason why I’m able to do this. Because I have constant good-quality input.” That is the only reason why I can maintain the output.

    —Ted Gioia
    Your output depends on your input

  • You are always trying to “be something” or to be noticed for your spirituality. There are a lot of people who have an outward spirituality, but inwardly they still think too much of themselves. People who think they are lowering themselves have a lot of conceit. They think they are doing others a favor in “getting down to their level.”

    True humility is not like this. A truly humble person is content in all situations. He doesn’t notice if he is being praised or blamed, and isn’t always weighing if what is being said to him or about him is to his advantage.

    François Fénelon, The Seeking Heart

  • When those who have acquired moral stability and contemplative knowledge employ these for the sake of human glory, merely conveying an outward impression of the virtues, and uttering words of wisdom and knowledge without performing the corresponding actions; and when in addition they display to others their vanity because of this supposed virtue and knowledge, then they are rightly handed over to commensurate hardships, in order to learn through suffering that humility which was unknown to them before because of their empty conceit.

    —St Maximos the Confessor