• Happiness and unhappiness depend on how much Love you have. 

    —Monk Simon of Mt. Athos

  • Even though we all hobble along with a limp and are filled with wounds and sins, we like to speak about others. When we visit a hospital, we will observe that all the patients have some type of illness. However, we will not see anyone criticizing another sick person. Have you ever noticed this? No one says to another patient: ‘Why are you lying in bed?’ Whereas, we are all sick spiritually; and yet, we criticize one another. We have a problem with our eye, and we like to occupy ourselves with someone who has lung disease. Unfortunately, we wretched people fail to realize this.

    —Elder Ephraim of Philotheou and Arizona

  • “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

    ―Mary Oliver

  • We are restless people who occasionally find rest, dissatisfied people who occasionally find fulfillment, and disquieted people who occasionally find serenity. We do not naturally default into rest, satisfaction, and quiet, but into their opposite.

    —Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality

  • The purpose of Christian marriage is for people to reach unselfish love and to cut off their own will, and thence reach God.

    —St. John Chrysostom

  • “Your mood can affect your level of motivation, but never let it affect your discipline. Successful people know what they need to do and do it, regardless of how they feel. Don’t miss out on possible opportunities just because you have chosen to be overpowered by temporary feelings.”

    —@emma_vogt

  • Are we exclusionary? Absolutely. Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny. But then you become totally vanilla. You don’t alienate anybody, but you don’t excite anybody, either.

    —Mike Jeffries, Former CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch

  • Just as the intellect of a hungry man imagines bread and that of a thirsty man water, so the intellect of a glutton imagines a profusion of foods.

    —St Maximos the Confessor, Four Hundred Texts on Love

  • And here’s David McCullough:

    There’s an awful temptation to just keep on researching. There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing. When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book. In time I began to understand that it’s when you start writing that you really find out what you don’t know and need to know.

    START BEFORE YOU THINK YOU’RE READY

  • As a child is indifferent to whatever clothes are put on it, so also the Christian, an infant in Christ, should be indifferent to the variety, richness, and beauty of his earthly garments, considering Christ, our God, his best and incorruptible garment; for an attachment to expensive, fine clothes is peculiar to the children of this world and to the heathen…

    —St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ p.158