SO GOOD QUOTES

Category: TEMPERANCE

  • If you have the urge to drink two cups of coffee, drink only one.

    —Tito Colliander, Way of the Ascetics

  • We overcome after a fashion, perhaps, our serious and danger vices, but there it stops. The small desires we freely let grow as they will. We neither embezzle nor steal, but delight in gossiping; we do not “drink,” but consume immoderate quantities of tea and coffee instead.

    —Tito Colliander, Way of the Ascetics

  • Struggle with your flesh until it is humbled. Once it is used to this modest and rough environment, it will become your mute slave. Humility of the flesh will be granted at last. You should always keep this in sight and strive for it as a reward for your labors. Physical podvigs [spiritual struggles] foster physical virtues: solitude, silence, endurance, vigilance, labor, patience in deprivations, purity, and virginity.

    You should remember that this friend of yours will end up in the grave. They say: Do not trust the flesh—it is deceitful. When you come to believe it is humbled, you relax, and it immediately grabs you and conquers you. This war with it continues to the grave, but it is much harder at first. Later it gets easier and easier until finally there remains only attention to its behavior with occasional light sensations of fleshly upsurge.

    —St. Theophan the Recluse, The Path to Salvation: A Manual of Spiritual Transformation

  • Our task is not to guard against sensual enjoyment, but to allow our minds to run “back up the sunbeam to the sun”—to see every pleasure as a “channel of adoration.”

    —Carolyn Arends, Worship con Queso

  • Your firmness, your self-control in that which concerns eating and sleeping-if someone wished to describe these things, how would he find words to do so? Moreover, you have not permitted anyone, so to speak, to refer to your self-control and firmness using these terms, for your virtues are so much greater that we must search for other names for them. Because in referring to someone’s self-control and firmness, we speak of one who, being tormented by a passion, controls it. But you, you have nothing to control, for from the beginning you have possessed great ardor against the flesh…

    —Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia

  • …you have taught your stomach to be content with only as much food and drink as you need to not die, and to not suffer [bodily] affliction. This is why I do not call your fasting and your self-control by these terms, but by something else greater.

    —Saint John Chrysostom, Letters to Saint Olympia

  • A clear rule for self-control handed down by the Fathers is this: stop eating while still hungry and do not continue until you are satisfied.

    —St. John Cassian

  • To Abba Pambo, who asked him, “What ought I to do?”  the old man said: “Do not trust in your own righteousness, do not worry about the past, but control your tongue and your stomach.”

    The Way of the Heart: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers
    Henri Nouwen

  • As the holy fathers say, when the intellect forgets the purpose of a religious observance, the outward practice of virtue loses its value. For whatever is done indiscriminately and without purpose is not only of no benefit – even though good in itself – but actually does harm. Conversely, what appears to be evil is really good if it is done for a godly purpose and accords with God’s will. The action of a man who goes into a brothel to rescue a prostitute from destruction is a case in point.

    Hence it is clear that someone who occasionally shows compassion is not compassionate, and someone who occasionally practices self-control is not self-controlled.

    —St John of Damaskos

  • Always keep the same measure of self-control; otherwise through irregularity you will go from one extreme to another.

    —St. Thalassios the Libyan