SO GOOD QUOTES

Category: TRANSCIENCE

  • In my life, wherever I was, I accepted everything as the Will of God and lived as if I were to stay in that place forever. This is the only way God wants us to be. Never a thought about the future. The future is His! The whole earth is but a waiting room for Eternity. Are we doing what we should at every moment of our life? Do we love according to the Commandments of God? Do we follow the example of Christ? …We must think always, “How would I behave if Christ were here, visible, near us, everywhere and at all times?” This should be the way of our life… Do not think about tomorrow, for “the morrow will take care of itself.” He Who has freed you from bondage will – if you believe – guide you, like Moses, to the Promised Land… Have no fear… If you have faith, follow the Good Shepherd and everything will be joy, peace, tranquility, and love for everyone and everything.

    —Mother Gavrilia (The Ascetic of Love)

  • “How long shall we live uselessly and in vain? Because, not to do what is well-pleasing to God is to live uselessly, or rather not merely uselessly, but to our own hurt; for when we have spent the time which has been given us on no good purpose, we shall depart this life to suffer severest punishment for our unseasonable extravagance.”

    — St. John Chrysostom

  • “You ask about eternal life, yet show yourself completely bound to the enjoyment of this present life.”

    —St. Basil the Great, On Social Justice

  • The one who is a stranger here will be a citizen up there; the one who is a stranger here will not be happy to live among present realities, will not be concerned for dwellings, money, food, anything else of that kind. Instead, just as people living in foreign parts do everything and busy themselves with a view to their return to their homeland, and daily strive to see the land that bore them, so too those in love with future realities are neither dejected by present griefs nor buoyed up by success, but ignore both like a traveler on the road.

    —St. John Chrysostom

  • 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

  • We do not rest satisfied with the present. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if in order to hasten its course; or we recall the past, to stop its too rapid flight. So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more, and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists. For the present is generally painful to us. We conceal it from our sight, because it troubles us, we regret to see it pass away. We try to sustain it by the future, and think of arranging matters which are not in our power, for a time which we have no certainty of reaching.

    Let each one examine his thoughts, and he will find them all occupied with the past and the future. We scarcely ever think of the present; and if we think of it, it is only to take light from it to arrange the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.

    Pensées
    Blaise Pascal

  • “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.”

    —Seneca, Great Ideas On the Shortness of Life

  • “People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.”

    —Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

  • It is a well-known fact that our society ignores death. It is understandable: Without God, without eternal life, without Christ, and without redemption, how can anyone bear the thought of death?

    The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise
    Cardinal Robert Sarah, Nicolas Diat

  • So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long.

    —Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It