Category: LOVE

  • “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

  • Finally, to see how necessary it is to love yourself, look at God’s great commandment to love our neighbor as ourself. If you don’t love yourself, you can’t even get off the ground with that commandment. In the early days of Christianity, people were taught not to try to obey that commandment until they had developed a healthy love for themselves first, and learned to protect and benefit themselves in many ways. One holy teacher said it’s better to be regarded as a destitute tramp than to try to benefit your neighbor before you have learned to benefit yourself. Running around doing a lot of charitable things for others when you still aren’t able to do anything charitable for yourself is a dangerous waste of time, because it nourishes hypocrisy and arrogance and resentment and cruelty. And you can’t possibly understand how to protect and comfort another person, how to meet his needs or lead him into a good life, unless you’ve learned to do those things first for your own self. So before you worry much about anything else or think about really benefitting any other people in the world, take hold of the natural self-love God has given you and become a faithful benefactor to yourself.

    Who is God? Who Am I? Who Are You?
    Dee Pennock

  • One Sunday, Met. Anthony Bloom gave a sermon as follows: “Last night a woman with a child came to this church. She was in trousers and with no headscarf. Someone scolded her. She left. I do not know who did that, but I am commanding that person to pray for her and her child to the end of his days to God for their salvation. Because of you, she may not go to church ever again.” He turned around and entered the altar. That was the entire sermon.

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  • God is perfect, He is faultless. And so, when Divine love becomes manifest in us in the fullness of Grace, we radiate this love — not only on the earth, but throughout the entire universe as well. So God is in us, and He is present everywhere. It is God’s all-encompassing love that manifests itself in us. When this happens, we see no difference between people: everyone is good, everyone is our brother, and we consider ourselves to be the worst of men — servants of every created thing.

    —Elder Thaddeus

  • Know that the desire to be perfect is probably the veiled expression of another desire—to be loved, perhaps,

    How to Be Perfect
    by RON PADGETT

  • There is no such thing as good or bad fortune for the individual; we live in common.  And no one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility; you must live for your neighbour, if you would live for yourself.

    —Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

  • St. Dorotheus of Gaza says there are two kinds of fear: one is the kind of fear that a beginner has and the other the kind of fear that a Saint has. The first person [the beginner] fears God because he is afraid of hell, he is afraid of punishment, he is afraid that at the end of days, he’ll be cast into darkness.

    The other Saint fears God because he seeks to please God because he loves Him. The fear is not of somebody being afraid of some kind of punishment, but because somebody has tasted the sweetness of God, the sweetness of being with God, and because of that, fears losing his relationship with God. St. Dorotheus of Gaza calls this the perfect fear: not a fear of punishment—not a fear of hell, but a fear of upsetting the one he loves.

    —Fr. Daniel Fanous
    Fear God, but don’t be afraid

  • Respect the opinion of the person with whom you speak, no matter how much you disagree.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III

  • The perfect person does not only try to avoid evil. Nor does he do good for fear of punishment, still less in order to qualify for the hope of a promised reward. The perfect person does good through love. His actions are not motivated by desire for personal benefit, so he does not have personal advantage as his aim. But as soon as he has realized the beauty of doing good, he does it with all his energies and in all that he does. He is not interested in fame, or a good reputation, or a human or divine reward. The rule of life for a perfect person is to be in the image and likeness of God.

    —St. Clement of Alexandria, A Perfect Person’s Rule of Life

  • “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