• When someone steals another’s clothes, we call them a thief. Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked and does not? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor.

    —St. Basil the Great, On Social Justice

  • “Beware of passionate attachments to the world. Although they deceive you with peace and comfort, they are so fleeting that you do not notice how you are deprived of them, and in their place come sorrow, longing, despondency, and no comfort whatsoever.”

    —St. Leonid of Optina

  • “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”

    —Mother Teresa

  • Mercy is not getting what we deserve. Grace is getting what we do not deserve.

  • We want something from Him, not Him at all. Is that a relationship? Do we behave in that way with our friends? Do we aim at what friendship can give us or is it the friend whom we love?

    —Met. Anthony Bloom, Beginning To Pray

  • First of all, it is very important to remember that prayer is an encounter and a relationship, a relationship which is deep, and this relationship cannot be forced either on us or on God. The fact that God can make Himself present or can leave us with the sense of His absence is part of this live and real relationship. If we could mechanically draw Him into an encounter, force Him to meet us, simply because we have chosen this moment to meet Him, there would be no relationship and no encounter. We can do that with an image, with the imagination, or with the various idols we can put in front of us instead of God; we can do nothing of that sort with the living God any more than we can do it with a living person. 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 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, Beginning To Pray

  • “If you realize the true value of prayer, it will become for you, as the saints said, an integral part of you, indispensable like your breath.”

    —H. H. Pope Shenouda III

  • “Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.”

    —Haruki Murakami

  • “The grass is brown on both sides.”

    —Fr. Carlin

  • Since I had already searched outside myself for fulfillment in nearly every possible way, I thought, why not up the ante? I decided to quit my job and sell everything that wouldn’t fit in a suitcase.  Then I set out on a journey across three continents in search of my life’s purpose. I wanted to locate the elusive intersection where my unique gifts and experiences collided with something the world needed. I hated when people asked if I was trying to “find myself” because this made me sound like a cliché, but really, that was exactly what I was doing. I was like a little kid on a scavenger hunt, scuttling over rocks and lifting logs, hoping to find something that had been in my pocket all along. Eventually, I did find what I was looking for. I found threads of it in every country I visited (there were seven in total: Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia) during my yearlong odyssey.

    The place where I truly came home to myself was much less exotic than expected—my inner, authentic self. She had been waiting patiently for me to put down my suitcase, quit distracting myself with outward pursuits, and return to join her in her natural habitat.

    The Irresistible Introvert: Harness the Power of Quiet Charisma in a Loud World
    Michaela Chung