• With Your Father Confessor

    Do not present him with your decisions, but with questions…

    Do not simply ask him to agree with something you have already made up your mind about and are resolved on. But rather ask him for advice, his opinion and information.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Experiences in Life

  • You mustn’t wage your Christian struggle with sermons and arguments, but with true secret love. When we argue, others react. When we love people, they are moved and we win them over. When we love, we think that we offer something to others, but in reality we are the first to benefit.

    — St Porphyrios

  • You understand that many of our faults are voluntary in different degrees, though they may not be committed with a deliberate purpose of failing in our allegiance to God. One friend sometimes reproaches another for a fault not expressly intended to be offensive, and yet committed with the knowledge that it would be so. In the same way, God lays this sort of faults to our charge. They are voluntary, for although not done with an express intention, they are still committed freely and against a certain interior light of conscience, which should have caused us to hesitate and wait.

    —François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress

  • Walk then in the spirit, like Abraham, without knowing whither you go; be content with your daily bread, and remember that in the desert the manna of today could not be preserved until tomorrow without corrupting.

    —François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress

  • As the holy fathers say, when the intellect forgets the purpose of a religious observance, the outward practice of virtue loses its value. For whatever is done indiscriminately and without purpose is not only of no benefit – even though good in itself – but actually does harm. Conversely, what appears to be evil is really good if it is done for a godly purpose and accords with God’s will. The action of a man who goes into a brothel to rescue a prostitute from destruction is a case in point.

    Hence it is clear that someone who occasionally shows compassion is not compassionate, and someone who occasionally practices self-control is not self-controlled.

    —St John of Damaskos

  • Always keep the same measure of self-control; otherwise through irregularity you will go from one extreme to another.

    —St. Thalassios the Libyan

  • How true is the saying, “The road to hell is full of excuses!”

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Words of Spiritual Benefit Vol. 1

  • 36. In everything that we do God searches out our purpose to see whether we do it for Him or for some other motive.

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

  • “He who believes the divine Scriptures with sure judgment, receives in the voice of God a demonstration that cannot be disputed. Faith, then, is not established by demonstration.”

    —Clement of Alexandria

  • God waits for the right moment to come and illumine your intellect. What you’ve been craving for one, two, three, five, twenty, or fifty years, you’ll be given in a moment.

    —Elder Aimilianos Simonopetritis