• Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation.

    Walden
    Henry David Thoreau

  • I’ve noticed that you always want to drop one thing to hurry on to the next. Yet each task takes you far too much time to finish because you dissect everything far too much. You are not slow—just long-winded. You want to say everything that has the slightest connection to the subject at hand. This always takes too long and causes you to rush from one thing to another.

    Try to be brief. Learn to get to the heart of the matter and disregard the nonessential. Don’t spend all your time musing! What you really need to do is sit quietly before God and your active argumentative mind would soon be calmed. God can teach you to look at each matter with a simple, clear view.  You could say what you mean in two words! And as you think and speak less, you will be less excitable and distracted. Otherwise, you will wear yourself out, and external thing will overpower your inward life as well as your health.

    Cut all this activity short! Silence yourself inwardly. Come back to your Lord often. You will get more accomplished this way. It is more important to listen to God than to your own thoughts.

    —François Fénelon, The Seeking Heart

  • “The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be…. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever.”

    ―Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man’s Hunger in His Youth

  • The course of your reading should be parallel to the aim of your way of life…. Most books that contain instructions in doctrine are not useful for purification. The reading of many diverse books brings distraction of mind down on you. Know, then, that not every book that teaches about religion is useful for the purification of the consciousness and the concentration of the thoughts.

    —St. Isaac the Syrian

  • Do you desire to study to your advantage? Let devotion accompany all your studies, and study less to make yourself learned than to become a saint. Consult God more than your books, and ask him, with humility, to make you understand what you read. Study fatigues and drains the mind and heart. Go from time to time to refresh them at the feet of Jesus Christ under his cross. Some moments of repose in his sacred wounds give fresh vigor and new lights. Interrupt your application by short, but fervent and ejaculatory prayers: never begin or end your study but by prayer. Science is a gift of the Father of lights; do not therefore consider it as barely the work of your own mind or industry.”

    —St. Vincent Ferrer

  • Jacob’s well (cf. John 4:5-15) is Scripture. The water is the spiritual knowledge found in Scripture. The depth of the well is the meaning, only to be attained with great difficulty, of the obscure sayings in Scripture. The bucket is learning gained from the written text of the word of God, which the Lord did not possess because He is the Logos Himself; and so He does not give believers the knowledge that comes from learning and study, but grants to those found worthy ever-flowing waters of wisdom that spill from the fountain of spiritual grace and never run dry. For the bucket – that is to say, learning – can only grasp a very small amount of knowledge and leaves behind all that it cannot lay hold of, however it tries. But the knowledge which is received through grace, without study, contains all the wisdom that man can attain, springing forth in different ways according to his needs. 

    —St Maximos the Confessor, Various Texts on Theology, the Divine Economy, and Virtue and Vice Second Century, Philokalia

  • A person who through the grace of God partakes of divine blessings is under an obligation to share them ungrudgingly with others. For Scripture says, ‘Freely you have received, freely give’ (Matt. 10:8). He who hides the gift in the earth accuses the Lord of being hard-hearted and mean (cf. Matt. 25:24), and in order to spare the flesh he pretends to know nothing about holiness; while he who sells the truth to enemies, and is then revealed as avid for self-glory, hangs himself, unable to bear the disgrace (cf. Matt. 26:15; 27:5).

    —St Maximos the Confessor

  • What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.

    —Søren Kierkegaard

  • Abba Ammon told Abba Sisoy: “When I read books, I want to notice wise sayings so that I have them in mind in case of need.” The elder answered him: “This is not necessary! It is necessary to acquire purity of mind and speak out of this purity, having entrusted to God.” 

    source

  • “Make firm my soul which has become corrupted by my laziness and apathy, O You who raises the lowly and rescues the afflicted. You know how apathetic and pitiful I am. You know how many wily and wicked thoughts fight against me. You see the enmity of the enemy and the many schemes which are employed against me. Be a help to me on account of your great mercy. Make me serious and watchful, animate me, and deliver me by Your grace.”

    —prayer from St. Ephraim the Syrian