This hunger must be natural, not artificial and provoked.
—Rev. Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667), The House of Feasting
Category: TEMPERANCE
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Let us accustom ourselves to eat so much only as will sustain our higher life, and not hinder and oppress it. For it was not for this that we were born, and exist—namely, that we should eat and drink; but let us eat for this—namely, that we may live. It was not given us at first to live for the sake of eating, but to eat for the sake of living. But we, as if we had come into the world merely to eat, upon this we spend everything.
On Wealth and Poverty
St. John Chrysostom -
The saint sees that one hour of sleep per day is sufficient for a monk. While many people see that a person must sleep for eight hours per day, some specialists and those who have experience assert that the body, through habit, may be satisfied with less than that, without any effect on the productivity of the person, just like the stomach which gets used to being small or large in size.
Abba Arsenius The Tutor of the Emperor’s Sons
Bishop Macarius -
Always keep the same measure of self-control; otherwise through irregularity you will go from one extreme to another.
—St. Thalassios the Libyan -
The intellect that has shut out the senses, and has achieved a balance in the body’s temperament, has to fight only against its memories.
—St. Thalassios the Libyan -
Whenever you feel a sense of “this is just the way it is”, there is probably some bad faith there. For years I assumed I can’t expect to get any writing done after 5pm — the energy or focus just isn’t there, so I’m practically sentenced to spend the evening reading, watching something on a screen, going out or otherwise not working.
This is an old, self-defeating lie, and there’s no telling what it’s cost me. There’s no barrier at 5pm. The line is completely imaginary. There’s just a strong aversion to my work when I get close to that time of day, and I pretend it’s some kind of natural law.
Our lives are riddled with imaginary lines. Bedtime isn’t a real thing. It’s a choice, every time. Going to work is a choice. Eating lunch is a choice. Letting ourselves down is a choice. Meeting a deadline is a choice, and missing it is a choice, as much as we’d like to believe each of those outcomes was inevitable all along.
Noticing bad faith doesn’t cure it, but it makes it harder to ignore. We can let ourselves suffer certain problems for years, if we think they’re happening to us the way weather does. But once you recognize a particular condition in your life as ultimately voluntary, its days are probably numbered.
I can’t describe to you how strong a feeling it is, but once it’s past 5pm, it truly feels like I can’t write. It seems like the part of my brain that does that is shuttered like a storefront on a Sunday evening.
But when I actually do sit down at six or seven or eight and start typing, the words come out like any other time. The door was always open, I just walked by it again and again and again.
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Some, I know not why (for I have not learned to pry conceitedly into the gifts of God) are by nature, I might say, prone to temperance, or silence, or purity, or modesty, or meekness, or contrition. But others, although almost their own nature itself resists them in this, to the best of their power force themselves; and though they occasionally suffer defeat yet, as men struggling with nature, they are in my opinion higher than the former.
St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent
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“Do not fight to expel the darkness from the chamber of your soul. Open a tiny aperture for light to enter and the darkness will disappear.”
Don’t start by removing negatives from your life—begin by adding positives.
SO GOOD QUOTES 