SO GOOD QUOTES

  • Silence is a sweet, violent seizure by God. The abstinence of speech, austerity, poverty: this is the asceticism of silence, the one that brings us back to the purity of the just.

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

  • Hold fast to your purpose and do not look back. We have been given a warning example in Lot’s wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back [Genesis 19:26]. You have cast off your old humanity; let the rags lie.

    Way of the Ascetics: The Ancient Tradition of Discipline and Inner Growth
    Tito Colliander

  • How do you benefit if, for example, you begin to sleep on a hard mattress but instead indulge in warm baths?

    Way of the Ascetics: The Ancient Tradition of Discipline and Inner Growth
    Tito Colliander

  • The degree of victory over self is of trifling importance. It consisted perhaps in our skipping our morning cigarette, or only in such an apparently unimportant thing as not turning our head or refraining from meeting a glance. The externally noticeable happening is not the decisive one. The little thing can be big, and the big, little.

    Way of the Ascetics: The Ancient Tradition of Discipline and Inner Growth
    Tito Colliander

  • Don’t struggle directly with temptation, don’t pray for it to go away, don’t say, ‘Take it from me, O God!’ Then you are acknowledging the strength of the temptation and it takes hold of you. Because, although you are saying ‘Take it from me, O God’, basically you are bringing it to mind and fomenting it even more. Your desire to be free of the passion will, of course, be there, but it will exist in a hidden and discrete way, without appearing outwardly.

    —St. Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia, Wounded by Love

  • “To leave off praying is the same thing as deserting one’s post. The gate stands open for the ravaging hordes, and the treasures one has gathered are plundered.”

    Way of the Ascetics: The Ancient Tradition of Discipline and Inner Growth
    Tito Colliander

  • “The abundance of words is the symptom of doubt. Incredulity is always talkative.”

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

  • We often forget that Christ loved to be silent. He set out for the desert, not to go into exile, but to encounter God. And at the most crucial moment in his life, when there was screaming on all sides, covering him with all sorts of lies and calumnies, when the high priest asked him: “Have you no answer to make?” Jesus preferred silence.

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

  • Without temptations, no one can be saved.

    —Isaac the Syrian

  • “Ordinarily we experience no pain when the soul is sick, yet on the contrary when the body is troubled we use every means possible to relieve that trouble. For this very reason God afflicts the body because of the sins of the soul, in order to restore health to man’s most noble aspect by making use of the least noble affliction.”

    —St. John Chrysostom