SO GOOD QUOTES

Category: PRAYER

  • Pray as much as you can, not as much as you should.

    —Fr. Thomas Hopko

  • “When in prayer, if we don’t feel joy and comfort, as does a little child who runs to its mother’s embrace, then we have either hurt someone through our conduct and harshness, or pride exists in us.”

    —St. Paisios the Athonite

  • You want to finish your rule of prayer quickly, in order to give rest to your weary body? Pray fervently, and you will sleep the most peaceful, quiet, and healthy sleep. Do not hurry, then, nor say your prayers anyhow; by half-an-hour’s prayer you will gain three whole hours of the soundest sleep. Are you hurrying to get to the place of your service or your work? Get up earlier; do not sleep so long; and pray fervently—you will thus obtain tranquillity, energy, and success in your work for the whole day.

    —St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ

  • Prayer is learning to live, without expecting to see results; it is learning to love, without hoping to see return; it is learning to be, without demanding to have. We cannot live and love and simply be, unless we are consumed by a total commitment to detachment.

    In the Heart of the Desert: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers

  • If the heart is vigilant (Song 5.2), then sleep is nothing for the body; this is like a person who is almost snoring and, when he hears robbers breaking in, does everything possible to escape them. Thus, if we are able to understand, we shall see that we are exactly like this.

    “Other Old Man” John, Letters From The Desert: A Selection of Questions and Responses (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press Popular Patristics Series)

  • “There are no bad days and good days, but there are days of prayer and days without prayer.”

    —Pope Kyrillos VI

  • So should the one inflamed with anger not pray at all? By no means! But instead of reaching for what is unattainable and even dangerous on account of his passionate condition, he should resort to those “short and intense” invocations of Christ, mentioned everywhere in the early monastic literature: those “short prayers” (as Augustine calls them), out of which the well-known “Jesus Prayer” developed.

    If you want to put the enemy to flight, pray without ceasing.

    These “concise,” “terse,” “repeated,” indeed “ceaseless” short prayers are the daily bread of whoever is tempted—even of him who is tempted directly by the demon of anger.

    Dragon’s Wine and Angel’s Bread: The Teaching of Evagrius Ponticus on Anger and Meekness
    Gabriel Bunge

  • Every thought which brings despair and excessive grief is from the devil, and you should reject it immediately, for it will cut the thread of prayer.

    —Elder Ephraim of Arizona

  • Do not do anything without signing yourself with the sign of the Cross! When you depart on a journey, when you begin your work, when you go to study, when you are alone, and when you are with other people, seal yourself with the Holy Cross.” 

    —Elder Cleopa of Sihastria

  • “Christians should regard their occupations as sidelines and prayer as their work.”

    —St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite