SO GOOD QUOTES

  • A sensitized person who feels himself at peace with nature and with the natural man in him is not going to be troubled about sex.

    Journal of a Solitude
    May Sarton

  • Therefore, since most embrace virginity while still young and unformed in understanding, this before anything else should be their employment, to search out a fitting guide and master of this way, lest, in their present ignorance, they should wander from the direct route, and strike out new paths of their own in trackless wilds.

    —St. Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity, Chap. 23

  • Why, we have known ascetics of this class who have persisted in their fasting even unto death, as if with such sacrifices God were well pleased Hebrews 13:16; and, again, others who rush off into the extreme diametrically opposite, practising celibacy in name only and leading a life in no way different from the secular; for they not only indulge in the pleasures of the table, but are openly known to have a woman in their houses ; and they call such a friendship a brotherly affection, as if, forsooth, they could veil their own thought, which is inclined to evil, under a sacred term. It is owing to them that this pure and holy profession of virginity is blasphemed among the Gentiles. 

    —St. Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity, Chap. 23

  • when human nature has been based by passionate inclinations, it stretches out its offer of purity like a hand to raise it up again and make it look above.

    —St. Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity, Chap. 2

  • When a person can’t find meaning they distract themselves with pleasure

    —Viktor Frankl

  • How long do you expect life to be? No one can guarantee its extent or quality. But temporary pleasures are not worth the eternal consequence. Consider all your deeds within an eternal perspective.

    ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM ON REPENTANCE & DEFEATING DESPAIR
    Letters to Theodore

  • A man who, seeing through the illusion with the eye of his spirit purged, lifts himself above the struggling world, and, to use the words of the Apostle, slights it all as but dung, in a way exiling himself altogether from human life by his abstinence from marriage, — that man has no fellowship whatever with the sins of mankind, such as avarice, envy, anger, hatred, and everything of the kind. He has an exemption from all this, and is in every way free and at peace; there is nothing in him to provoke his neighbours’ envy, because he clutches none of those objects round which envy in this life gathers. He has raised his own life above the world, and prizing virtue as his only precious possession he will pass his days in painless peace and quiet.

    On Virginity, Chap. 4
    St. Gregory of Nyssa

  • We have indeed a mark to guide us safely over the ocean of temptations; and why make the too curious inquiry, whether some with such thoughts as these have not fallen nevertheless, and why therefore despair, as if the achievement was beyond your reach? Look on him who has succeeded, and boldly launch upon the voyage with confidence that it will be prosperous, and sail on under the breeze of the Holy Spirit with Christ your pilot and with the oarage of good cheer. For those who go down to the sea in ships and occupy their business in great waters do not let the shipwreck that has befallen someone else prevent their being of good cheer; they rather shield their hearts in this very confidence, and so sweep on to accomplish their successful feat.

    —Saint Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity

  • The old man is completely composed of passions. The divesting of it means spiritual martyrdom, by which you appointed yourselves to martyrdom. You know that this is true from your own experience. The external labors and podvigs are not as painful as the taming of the thoughts, the extinguishing of the passions, the tearing away of the temptations. If such movements can arise in a moment, then you are at any moment in labors, in wounds and turmoils.

    —St. Theophan the Recluse, Kindling the Divine Spirit

  • CHAPTER VI: That no one comes to grief by a sudden fall, but is destroyed by falling through a long course of carelessness.

    FOR no one is ever driven to sin by being provoked through another’s fault, unless he has the fuel of evil stored up in his own heart. Nor should we imagine that a man has been deceived suddenly when he has looked on a woman and fallen into the abyss of shameful lust: but rather that, owing to the opportunity of looking on her, the symptoms of disease which were hidden and concealed in his inmost soul have been brought to the surface

    —St. John Cassian, Institutes