A brother asked Abba Poemen: “How can a person avoid speaking ill of his neighbor?” The elder said to him: “We and our brothers are two portraits. Whenever a man regards himself and finds fault [with what he sees], his brother will be found honorable before his eyes. But when he seems fine to himself, he finds his brother inferior in his sight.
Give Me a Word: The Alphabetical Sayings of the Desert Fathers
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…‘O Lord, have I not asked you to free me from this anger?’ And the Lord answered, ‘Yes, Philip, and for this reason I am multiplying the occasions for you to learn.’
—Met. Anthony Bloom, Beginning To Pray -
I realized that a huge regret I felt with my mom was the complete disregard I’d had for her time. I came to visit when I felt like it, left when it was good for me, and flaked if I couldn’t “handle” her that day.
When a Wrong Can’t Be Righted: How to Deal With Regret -
If you are patient, the Holy Spirit that dwells in you will be pure. He will not be darkened by any evil spirit, he will rejoice and be glad; and with the vessel in which he dwells, he will serve God in gladness, having great peace within himself. But if any outburst of anger takes place, the Holy Spirit seeks to depart because He does not have a pure place. For the Lord dwells in patience, but the devil in anger. The two spirits, then, when living in the same place, are in conflict with each other and are troublesome to the person in whom they dwell. For if an extremely small piece of wormwood is put into a jar of honey, isn’t the honey entirely destroyed? And doesn’t the extremely small piece of wormwood take away the sweetness of the honey entirely so that it no longer pleases its owner, but has become bitter and lost its use? But if the wormwood isn’t put into the honey, then the honey remains sweet and is useful to its owner. You see, then, that patience is sweeter than honey. It is useful to God, and the Lord dwells in it. But anger is bitter and useless. If anger is mixed with patience, then the patience is polluted, and its prayer becomes useless to God.
—Hermas -
A lot of times, we think there is a problem in my life because of this or that. We rarely think that it’s my sins that are causing a problem.
It’s not my coworker, it’s not my life situation, it’s not my illness, not my family situation, or anything else; it’s my sins. My sins are making me incapable of dealing with this problem in a way that a true christian would deal with it. No matter your problems, no matter whose fault it is, it’s also always your fault. That’s the way a Christian thinks.
—Fr. Seraphim Holland -
Everything, the merest trifles, even the smoke of a candle blowing on him, irritates and angers the impatient man, because he is very self-loving, and cares much for the welfare and comfort of his carnal man, which he ought oftener to crucify in different ways.
—St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ -
These angers are crippling, like a fit when they happen, and then, when they are over, haunting me with remorse. Those who know me well and love me have come to accept them as part of me; yet I know they are unacceptable.
—May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude -
What we gain from fasting does not compensate for what we lose through anger. Our profit from scriptural reading in no way equals the damage we cause ourselves by showing contempt for a brother. We must practice fasting, vigils, withdrawal, and the meditation of Scripture as activities which are subordinate to our main objective, purity of heart, that is to say, love, and we must never disturb this principal virtue for the sake of those others. If this virtue remains whole and unharmed within us nothing can injure us, not even if we are forced to omit any of those other subordinate virtues. Nor will it be of any use to have practiced all these latter if there is missing in us that principal objective for the sake of which all else is undertaken.
—St. John Cassian (Conferences, Conf. One sect. 7; Paulist Press pg. 42)
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“Anger is vanquished by renouncing our desires and our own will.”
—Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica
SO GOOD QUOTES 