SO GOOD QUOTES

Category: PARENTS

  • 153. YOUR COMFORT AND THE COMFORT OF OTHERS 

    A noble person does not build his comfort on the weariness of others. But the noble one is he who sacrifices his comfort in order to comfort others. 

    A mother might feel comfort in having her son by her side while the son, at the same time, might find comfort in being far from home. He might travel, migrate, become a monk or live on his own with a wife. Here, the noble mother would let him go without insisting on her comfort by his side.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Words of Spiritual Benefit Vol. IV

  • “We spare neither labors nor means in order to teach our children secular sciences, so that they can serve well the earthly authorities. Only the knowledge of the holy Faith, the service of the Heavenly King are a matter of indifference to us. We allow them to attend spectacles but we care little whether they go to Church and stand within it reverently. We demand an account from them of what they learned in their secular institutes—why do we not demand an account from them of what they heard in the Lord’s house?”

    —St. John Chrysostom

  • “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

  • As a child I was always borrowing other people’s families, being invited for a week or a month in the summer to share a family life.

    Journal of a Solitude
    May Sarton

  • The litmus test of true love for God is our love for our neighbor.

    —Archbishop Averky (Taushev)

  • The criterion of my spiritual health is this: what is the state of relations between me and those with whom I live? No other criterion is higher. Family life is the measuring stick of Christian progress for those who live in the world.

    ―Sister Magdalen, Children in the Church Today: An Orthodox Perspective

  • Stay inside your commitments and your family—they will teach you where life is found and what love means.

    —Ronald Rolheiser, Domestic Monastery

  • La Deuxième Nuit – The Second Night (Eric Pauwels, 2016)

  • For instance, a spouse who demands to be treated according to their own “love language” and disregards that of their partner practices an imperfect, selfish love; likewise, a child who expresses frustration in their parents’ failure to understand them while denying them the opportunity to understand them, or even a parent who exerts their own preferences on their child without attempting to understand their child and their differences from them, similarly practice an imperfect love. The expectations of what another “should do” in a relationship, or what one “deserves” from a relationship, ought not be divorced from the kind of love which God both instructs us to establish and exemplifies in His relation with us.

    Imperfect Love: Struggling to Love Like God
    Hilana Said