• “Life on earth seemed so insignificant in comparison with the permanence of eternal life.”

    Orthodox Afterlife
    John Habib

  • What is this whole world, with all its continents, its past, present, and future? What does it amount to? Nothing! I resonate with a statement from one scholar who once said: “When I was a child I saw myself in comparison to the world as a small speck of sand on an endless beach of an endless ocean.” So what if someone lives in any given city within a specific country, which is part of a specific continent, which in turn is a small part of planet Earth, itself just one of innumerable planets? What would that mean? It is nothing. What does this person turn out to be? He says: “When I was a child, I saw myself as a small speck of sand on an endless beach of an endless ocean, but now I know that I am the endless ocean and the whole world is a small speck of sand on my beach.” 

    One who sits to think of the world finds that it is frivolous. If you asked him, “What is the world?” he would say, “A small speck of sand on my beach.” And if you asked, “What is your endless beach?” he would reply, “This is the beach leading to eternity.” If you see yourself as the image and likeness of God, then what does this world amount to? With all its noise, struggles, desires, and status, what does the world amount to? Nothing. This is a person’s valuation of the world.


    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Monastic Treasures for All of Us

  • I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.

    —Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

  • This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this, and I do not. Everything is unique—and insignificant.

    The Trouble with Being Born
    Emil Cioran

  • I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything.

    —Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

  • The person who really knows what’s going on, a lot of times, you find him more reserved.

    —Fr. Mina Dimitri

  • ”Only struggle a little more. Carry your cross without complaining. Don’t think you are anything special. Don’t justify your sins and weaknesses, but see yourself as you really are. And, especially, love one another.”

    —Fr. Seraphim Rose

  • for even now in his declining years, time has not blunted the keen activity of his soul, nor was his youth active in the sphere of youth’s well-known employments; in both seasons of life he has shown a wonderful combination of opposites

    —Saint Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity

  • Some call men intelligent because they have the power of discernment on the sensible plane. But the really intelligent people are those who control their own desires.

    —St Mark the Ascetic

  • …and he changed them all. By what means? By means of the earnest. How was he sufficient for these things?

    By the grace of the Spirit. Unskilled, ill-clothed, ill-shod he was upheld by Him Who also has given the earnest of the Spirit. Therefore he says, “And who is sufficient for these things?” (2 Cor. 2:16). “But our sufficiency is of God, who has made us sufficient as ministers of the New Testament, not of the letter but of the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:5-6).

    —Saint John Chrysostom, On the Vanity of Riches
    HOMILY Two
    After Eutropios, having been found outside the church, was taken captive