SO GOOD QUOTES

Category: SOBRIETY

  • Be severe in your judgment concerning your proportions, and let no occasion make you enlarge far beyond your ordinary. For a man is surprised by parts; and while he thinks one glass more will not make him drunk, that one glass hath disabled him from well discerning his present condition and neighbour danger. 

    —Rev. Jeremy Taylor, On Christian Sobriety -Rules for obtaining temperance., The Whole Works of the Right Rev. Jeremy Taylor, Volume 3. THE RULE AND EXERCISES OF HOLY LIVING AND DYING….: The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living and Dying

  • Love is the Kingdom, whereof the Lord mystically promised His disciples to eat in His Kingdom. For when we hear Him say, ‘Ye shall eat and drink at the table of My Kingdom’ what do we suppose we shall eat, if not love? Love is sufficient to nourish a man instead of food and drink. This is the wine ‘which maketh glad the heart of man’. Blessed is he who partakes of this wine! Licentious men have drunk this wine and felt
    shame; sinners have drunk it and have forgotten the pathways of stumbling; drunkards have drunk this wine and become fasters; the rich have drunk it and desired poverty; the poor have drunk it and been enriched with hope; the sick have drunk it and become strong; the unlearned have taken it and been made wise.

    —St. Isaac the Syrian

  • “For while there is nothing so desirable that it does not become loathsome through continual enjoyment, what is taken rarely is enjoyed quite eagerly.”

    —St. Basil the Great, On Fasting and Feasts

  • “What we’re often really craving is not the thing that we desire, but the reprieve we feel once we have relieved ourselves from the yearning of desire.”

    —Kass Sarll

  • Orthodox Christianity distinguishes between wine and intoxicating liquor or spirits, and bans the latter.

    The Bible says: “Do not not mix with winebibbers.. for drunkards.. become poor. ” (Prov. 23:20)

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, So Many Years with the Problems of People Part III

  • Many, if not most, alcohol and drug addicts eventually free themselves from the clutches of addiction on their own, without therapeutic help

    Self-change from problems with alcohol and drugs: A scoping review of the literature since 2010
    Florian De Meyer, Nellie Bencherif, Clara De Ruysscher, Lou Lippens, Wouter Vanderplasschen

  • “Someday alcohol will stop working for you. And you are left in this horrible hamster wheel of chasing something you used to know, and it never comes back.”

    —Janelle Hanchett

  • They say the drink is not worth all the pain it eases

    i_o & Lights – Prayers

  • He sympathized with me and said, ‘The same thing happened to my own brother and what do you think helped him? His spiritual father gave him a copy of the Gospels with strict orders to read a chapter without a moment’s delay every time he felt a longing for wine coming over him. If the desire continued he was to read a second chapter, and so on. That is what my brother did and at the end of a very short time his drunkenness came to an end.

    The Way of a Pilgrim

  • One of the most famous sidetracks is pride.  Having overcome an over-eating problem or a drinking problem or an addiction or bad habit of one sort or another, instead of being humbly thankful for one’s new life, the reformed person becomes puffed up at his or her success.  In such cases, the person may be worse off than before, from a spiritual perspective.  And this pride can take on a whole range of hues and tones so that it does not appear as pride, so that it seems to be nothing more than so-called self-esteam or a new passion to be better and better at fitness, or healthy eating or even preaching the evils of self indulgence.  Pride hides behind many masks.

    —Fr. Michael Gillis, A Small Affliction Born For God’s Sake