SO GOOD QUOTES

Category: TEMPTATION & LUST & VIRGINITY

  • A famous Christian long ago told us that when he was a young man he prayed constantly for chastity; but years later he realised that while his lips had been saying, “Oh Lord, make me chaste,” his heart had been secretly adding, “But please don’t do it just yet.”

    —C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

  • “As often as you find your way to be peaceful, without variations, be suspicious. For you are deviating from the divine ways trodden by the weary footsteps of the saints. The more you proceed on the way towards the city of the kingdom and approach its neighborhood, this will be the sign: you will meet hard temptations. And the nearer you approach, the more difficulties you will find.”

    —St. Isaac of Syria

  • 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

  • “A small fire often destroys a whole forest; so too a small flaw spoils all our labour.”

    —St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent

  • “For if a man does not first sin in his mind, he will never sin in action.”

    —St. Maximos the Confessor

  • “He who hates the passions gets rid of their causes. But he who is attracted by their causes is attacked by the passions even though he does not wish it.”

    —St. Mark the Ascetic

  • “Do not say: ‘I don’t want it, but it happens.’ For even though you may not want the thing itself, yet you welcome what causes it.”

    —St. Mark the Ascetic

  • “You will lose nothing of what you have renounced for the Lord’s sake. For in its own time it will return to you greatly multiplied.”

    —St. Mark the Ascetic

  • “The pleasure is fleeting, while the pain is lasting.”

    —St. John Chrysostom, On Wealth and Poverty

  • Hold fast to your purpose and do not look back. We have been given a warning example in Lot’s wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back [Genesis 19:26]. You have cast off your old humanity; let the rags lie.

    Way of the Ascetics: The Ancient Tradition of Discipline and Inner Growth
    Tito Colliander