Category: TEMPTATION & LUST & VIRGINITY

  • The unrest incident to youth, the vacillating response to disparate appeals, the insatiable hunger for whatever appears attractive or beautiful will subside, and a steady orientation towards the essential and decisive become dominant.

    Supernatural readiness to change should grow with age..

    Transformation in Christ
    Dietrich von Hildebrand

  • Whenever the process of the soul’s submission to God reaches its full stride, man will never be able to bear any pleasure, comfort, or corruptive seduction that draws him away from his state of submission to God and his enjoyment of his obedience to him. This is freedom, absolute freedom.

    —Matthew the Poor, Orthodox Prayer Life

  • It is better to elude the passions by the recollection of the virtues than by resisting and disputing with them. For when the passions leave their place and arise for battle, they
    imprint on the mind images and idols, and this warfare has great force, able to weaken the mind and violently to perturb and confuse a man’s thinking. But if a man acts by the first rule we have mentioned, when the passions are repulsed they leave no trace in the mind.

    —St. Isaac the Syrian

  • 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

  • When temptation overtakes the iniquitous man, he has no confidence wherewith to call upon God, nor to expect salvation from Him, since in the days of his ease he stood
    aloof from God’s will.

    —St. Isaac the Syrian

  • Love sinners, but hate their works; and do not despise them for their faults, lest you be tempted by the same.

    —St. Isaac the Syrian

  • “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

  • But also because she knows that she and the photographer have already taken each other to the perfect and beautiful world. And that now it’s time to descend to the actual one. If they try to live in that other world for good, it will recede into the distance; it will be as if they’d never been there at all. She says goodbye, and they long for each other for the rest of their lives.

    Bittersweet
    Susan Cain

  • “As with gluttony, the more single-mindedly we pursue something for the pleasure we can get from it, the less likely we are to find our desire for pleasure satisfied.”

    —Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies

  • I always remember an alcoholic friend who expressed to me his frustration at praying daily for God to remove his desire for drink. Was God even listening? Later it dawned on him that the desire for alcohol was the main reason he prayed so diligently. Persistent temptation had compelled persistent prayer.

    Unanswered prayer: God, where are you?