• Within the repentant person there is first fear, then the lightness of hope; sorrow, then comfort; terror to the point of despair, then the breath of the consolation of mercy.  One thing replaces another, and this supplies or keeps a person who is in a state of corruption or parting with life in the hope, however, of receiving new life.

    —St. Theophan the Recluse, The Path to Salvation: A Manual of Spiritual Transformation

  • A brother asked Poemen, “How should I conduct myself in the place where I live?”

    Poemen answered, “Be as careful as a stranger, and wherever you are, do not expect the things you say to be taken seriously. Do this and you will discover peace.”

    By Way of the Desert: 365 Daily Readings
    Bernard Bangley

  • “When I wish to rest, I pray. I realized that the only effective way to get some rest is through praying. Therefore, pray and study.”

    —St. Paisios of Mount Athos

  • People who are so full of pride that they become overly dependent upon their parents are bound to resent their parents, because leaning on one’s family keeps increasing the feeling of failure—a feeling everybody just naturally hates. The only reason so many younger people are full of resentment and anger against their parents—or institutions or the establishment or whatever—is that they are so filled with pride, so mixed up about what God is and what human beings are, that they were expecting the older generation to be gods. A lot of the older generation had just as much pride and really tried to play God. But that’s their problem. Your problem is only to get rid of the pride in yourself, so you don’t play God and pass the game on to your children. Anyone who expects his parents to be gods, and wants to lean on them as if they were, will end up disliking them intensely. If you put your parents first, above God, you’ll hate them and also hate God because of the way things will turn out. But if you always put God first and lean completely on Him, you will end up truly loving both God and your (merely human) parents.

    Who is God? Who Am I? Who Are You?
    Dee Pennock

  • For lack of wood the fire goes out,
    and where there is no whisperer,
    quarreling ceases.
    PROVERBS 26:20

    A brother asked a hermit, “Abba, if someone brings me gossip, should I ask him to stop speaking?”
    “No.”
    “Why?”
    “Because we also gossip. We would be asking someone else to do what we cannot do.”
    “Then what is the best thing to do?”
    “The best thing is to remain silent. Silence is better for us and for others as well.”

    By Way of the Desert: 365 Daily Readings
    Bernard Bangley

  • “A healthy man is always an earthly, material man…But as soon as he falls ill, and the normal, earthly order of his existence is disturbed, then the possibility of another world makes itself known to him at once; and as the illness worsens, his relationship with this other world becomes ever closer.”

    The Brothers Karamazov
    Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  • Illness often challenges our former, false equilibrium, and leads us to question the very foundations of our existence. It effectively weakens our impassioned attachments to this world. And in so doing, it reveals the vanity of those attachments and leads us to surpass their limits.

    The Theology of Illness
    Jean-Claude Larchet

  • Do you wish people to believe good of you? Don’t speak.

    —Blaise Pascal, Pensées

  • In writing down my thought, it sometimes escapes me; but this makes me remember my weakness, that I constantly forget. This is as instructive to me as my forgotten thought; for I strive only to know my nothingness.

    —Blaise Pascal, Pensées

  • Let us remain humble when we speak about someone else’s suffering. Only the one who has truly suffered has the right to speak.

    The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise
    Cardinal Robert Sarah