• No one should forget: Eros (love) alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity.

    —Emil Cioran

  • A certain member of what was then considered the circle of the wise once approached the just Antony and asked him: “How do you ever manage to carry on, Father, deprived as you are of the consolation of books?” His reply: “My book, sir philosopher, is the nature of created things, and it is always at hand when I wish to read the words of God.”

    Dragon’s Wine and Angel’s Bread: The Teaching of Evagrius Ponticus on Anger and Meekness
    Gabriel Bunge

  • What you should feel is the kind of feeling felt by a son, whose only concern is that his father should be pleased with him. It is not the feeling of the slave, whose only concern is to be saved from punishment.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Return To God

  • Satan may allow us to talk about God for many hours, but he will never let us talk with Him, even for a few minutes.

    —Fr. Bishoy Kamel

  • Clement of Alexandria furthers this notion by indicating that rewards in the afterlife will be dependent in part on one’s underlying motivation for why they performed any work for God: The same work, then, is different, depending on what prompted it. Was it because of fear, or was it accomplished because of love, faith, or knowledge? Rightly, therefore, their rewards are different. 

    Orthodox Afterlife
    John Habib

  • “We did all these things – all these miracles – in Your name. How is it that You say you don’t know us?” That is when He [the Lord] proceeds to say, “You didn’t know Me. You did these things for Me, but you didn’t know Me.”

    …

    There’s a difference between doing something because you want to do versus because you have to.

    —Fr. Antony Paul

  • “A relationship must begin and develop in mutual freedom. If you look at the relationship in terms of mutual relationship, you will see that God could complain about us a great deal more than we do about Him. We complain that He does not make Himself present to us for the few minutes we reserve for Him, but what about the twenty-three and a half hours during which God may be knocking at our door and we answer ‘I am busy, I am sorry’ or when we do not answer at all because we do not even hear the knock at the door of our heart, of our minds, of our conscience, of our life. So there is a situation in which we have no right to complain of the absence of God because we are a great deal more absent than He ever is.”

    —Met. Anthony Bloom

  • “We may study as much as we will but we shall still not come to know the Lord unless we live according to His commandments, for the Lord is not made known through learning but by the Holy Spirit. Many philosophers and scholars have arrived at the belief in the existence of God. To believe in God is one thing, to know God is another.”

    — St. Silouan the Athonite

  • “It is better to be a simpleton and approach God with love than to be a learned man and at the same time an enemy of God.”

    —St. Irenaeus of Lyons

  • The only really valuable religious and moral training I ever got as a child came to me from my father, not systematically, but here and there and more or less spontaneously, in the course of ordinary conversations. Father never applied himself, of set purpose, to teach me religion. But if something spiritual was on his mind, it came out more or less naturally. And this is the kind of religious teaching, or any other kind of teaching, that has the most effect. “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart, bringeth forth good fruit; and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth that which is evil. For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.”

    —Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain