• “A household slave runs away from the master that beats him.  But you remain with the wine that beats your head each day.”

    —St. Basil the Great

  • “A household slave runs away from the master that beats him.  But you remain with the wine that beats your head each day.”

    —St. Basil the Great, On Fasting and Feasts: St. Basil the Great, Homily Against Drunkards

  • For wine leads to more wine.  It does not satisfy a need, but produces an inexorable need for another drink, making those who are drunk thirsty and arousing in them an even-greater appetite for more.  But even though they imagine that they have an insatiable desire for drink, they experience or rather deliberately choose something quite the opposite of this.  For by continual self-indulgence they dull their senses.  Just as too much light blinds the eyes, and those buffeted by loud noises are made completely deaf by the excessive beating that their ears suffer, so too drunkards fail to notice that they destroy whatever pleasure they experience by their excessive love of pleasure.  They find the wine tasteless and watery even if it is undiluted.  And when in its place they drink fresh wine, they find it warm, even if it is completely unmixed, even if it is ice-cold, and it cannot quench that internal fire that burns within them from an excessive amount of wine.

    —St. Basil the Great, On Fasting and Feasts: St. Basil the Great, Homily Against Drunkards

  • Drunkards are more pitiable than those sailing on dangerous waters insofar as the latter blame winds, the sea, and external forces, but the former willingly choose to enter the storm of drunkenness.  Whoever is possessed by a demon is pitiable, but whoever is drunk, even though he suffers the same things, does not deserve our pity because he wrestles with a demon of his own choosing.

    —St. Basil the Great, On Fasting and Feasts: St. Basil the Great, Homily Against Drunkards

  • “A thankful person does not need tranquilizers – his peaceful heart is a substitute for these – but the unthankful is always troubled, and this in turn keeps him away from giving thanks.”

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, The Life of Thanksgiving

  • Damage (1992)

  • Parthenope (2024)

  • He who honors celibacy and virginity must keep his loins girded and his lamp burning (cf. Luke 12:35). He keeps his loins girded through self-control, and his lamp burning through prayer, contemplation and spiritual love.

    —St. Maximos the Confessor, Four Hundred Texts on Love

  • 56. When the body is urged by the senses to indulge its own desires and pleasures, the corrupted intellect readily succumbs and assents to its impassioned fantasies and impulses. But the regenerated intellect exercises self-control and withholds itself from them. Moreover, as a true philosopher it studies how to rectify such impulses.

    —St. Maximos the Confessor, Four Hundred Texts on Love