The gentle is a good-natured and peaceful person. He is always quiet.
His character is calm, and also his nerves, his words, his countenance, and his movements are calm. Not only his outer appearance, but also his inner self is calm. His heart and his emotions are calm. He is calm in his dealings with the others.
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The voice of the gentle is always gentle.
His voice is never high nor sharp. His words are neither severe nor hard. The still and low voice is a characteristic of the gentle.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Fruits of the Spirit
Category: Uncategorized
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Among the items that waste time is for the mind to replay what it saw during the day. It finds audiovisual flashbacks of the entire past: discussions, images, actions, meetings, and conversations, as well as the mind’s consequent inferences— this consumes a great amount of time.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Monastic Treasures for All of Us
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It’s not a brand that creates marketing-driven products. It has never advertised because it doesn’t need to: advertising exists to create imagined value, to imbue a product or a brand with a quality that isn’t really there. It’s a socially-acceptable and highly-lucrative form of deceit used by brands who know, innately, that its products can’t justify themselves.
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Its rise has been fueled by word of mouth, or blog posts on sites such as this one. There’s no seeding, gifting of products or relying on so-called “influencers.” Instead of coercing, the brand seduces. Emphasis is entirely on the product.
—Aleks Eror -
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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By design, we must fully live the life that only we can live. Every person that lives less than his or her potential is limiting all human potential because that person is not offering the world the fullness of his or her true self.
More or Less: Choosing a Lifestyle of Excessive Generosity
Jeff Shinabarger -
“Not only do my choices and their consequences effect those around me immediately, but my choices also effect those far away and those not yet born.”
—Fr. Michael Gillis
“Your lives in your homes are a responsibility, and have a deep effect in the generations coming after you.”
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III
“The life of each one of us does not end at death on this earth and birth into heaven. We place a seal on everyone we meet. This responsibility continues after death, and the living are related to the dead for whom they pray. In the dead we no longer belong completely to the world; in us the dead still belong to history. Prayer for the dead is vital; it expresses the totality of our common life.”
—Metropolitan Anthony Bloom
Every human being is an incalculable force, bearing within him something of the future. To the end of time, our daily words and actions will bear fruit, either good or bad; nothing that we have once given of ourselves will perish, but our words and works, handed on from one to another, will continue to do good or harm to remote generations. This is why life is a sacred thing, and we ought not to pass through it thoughtlessly, but to appreciate its value and use it so that, when we are gone, the sum total of good in the world may be greater.
—Servant of God Elisabeth Leseur
