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“Art like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.” —G. K. Chesterton
“Do not be surprised that you fall every day; do not give up, but stand your ground courageously. And assuredly, the angel who guards you will honor your patience.” —St. John Climacus
“The life of the righteous was radiant. How did it become radiant if it wasn’t by patience? Love patience, O monk, as the mother of courage.” —St. Ephrem the Syrian
“Faintness of heart is a sign of despondency, and negligence is the mother of both. A cowardly man shows that he suffers from two diseases: love of his flesh and lack of faith; for love of one’s flesh is a sign of unbelief. But he who despises the love of the flesh proves that he believes in God with his whole heart and awaits the age to come … A courageous heart and scorn of perils comes from one of two causes: either from hardness of heart or from great faith in God. Pride accompanies hardness of heart, but humility accompanies faith. A man cannot acquire hope in God unless he first does His will with exactness. For hope in God and manliness of heart are born of the testimony of the conscience, and by the truthful testimony of the mind we possess confidence towards God.” —St. Isaac the Syrian, Homily 40
“Everyday I lay a foundation for building my repentance, and again with my own hands I demolish it.” —St. Ephrem the Syrian
“…should we fall, we should not despair and so estrange ourselves from the Lord's love. For if He so chooses, He can deal mercifully with our weakness. Only we should not cut ourselves off from Him or feel oppressed when constrained by His commandments, nor should we lose heart when we fall short of our goal…let us always be ready to make a new start. If you fall, rise up. If you fall again, rise up again. Only do not abandon your Physician, lest you be condemned as worse than a suicide because of your despair. Wait on Him, and He will be merciful, either reforming you, or sending you trials, or through some other provision of which you are ignorant.” —St. Peter of Damascus
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Favorite Quotations:
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” —Edmund Burke
“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.” —Lucius Annaeus Seneca
“The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present.” —Bill Watterson
“I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.” —Rudyard Kipling, The Elephant's Child
“Infomania erodes our capacity for significance. With a mind-set fixed on information, our attention span shortens. We collect fragments. We become mentally poorer in overall meaning. We get into the habit of clinging to knowledge bits and lose our feel for the wisdom behind knowledge. In the information age, some people even believe that literacy or culture is a matter of having the right facts at our fingertips.
“He who strikes terror in others is himself continually in fear.” —Claudius Claudianus
“Who feareth to suffer suffereth already, because he feareth.” —Michel de Montaigne
“The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.” —Thomas Jefferson
“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.” —Albert Einstein
“Time is a violent torrent; no sooner is a thing brought to sight then it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.” —Marcus Aurelius
“The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.” —Marcus Aurelius
“The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any.” —Fred Astaire
“Politeness has become so rare that people mistake it for flirtation.” —unknown
“Political correctness is tyranny with manners.” —Charlton Heston
“Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.” —John W. Gardner
“Art like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.” —G. K. Chesterton
“A painter paints pictures on canvas, but musicians paint their pictures on silence.” —Leopold Stokowski
“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” —Maria Robinson
“If names are not correct, language will not be in accordance with the truth of things.” —K'ung Fu-Tzu (Confucius)
“I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.” —Albert Einstein
“They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.” —K'ung Fu-Tzu (Confucius)
“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.” —K'ung Fu-Tzu (Confucius)
“All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
“And she [Athens] has brought it about that the name "Hellenes" suggests no longer a race but an intelligence, and that the title "Hellenes" is applied rather to those who share our culture then to those who share a common blood.” —Isocrates
“I teach them all the good I can, and recommend them to others from whom I think they will get some moral benefit. And the treasures that the wise men of old have left us in their writings I open and explore with my friends. If we come on any good thing, we extract it, and we set much store on being useful to one another.” —Socrates
“What a lot of things there are a man can do without.” —Socrates
“If you hear that someone is speaking ill of you, instead of trying to defend yourself you should say: ‘He obviously doesn't know me very well, since there are so many other faults he could have mentioned.’” —Epictetus
“As I have said so many times, God doesn't play dice with the world.” —Albert Einstein
“It is strictly and philosophically true in nature and reason that there is no such thing as chance or accident; it being evident that these words do not signify anything really existing, anything that is truly an agent or the cause of any event; but they signify merely men's ignorance of the real and immediate cause.” —Samuel Clark
“Heaven goes by favor; if it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.” —Mark Twain
“When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing—they nothing – they believe in anything.” —G. K. Chesterton
“If everyone has his own truth, then where is falsehood?Falsehood hides behind the guise of truth. They say to us: Every person has his own truth, we should respect everyone’s opinion and have no right to express any opposition to his error because that would be ‘intolerant’. Then where is Truth? Have we erased it? God is absolute Truth.” —Archbishop Stephan (Kalaidjishvili)of Tsageri and Lentekhi, Georgia
“Faithful copies of a counterfeit original yield only more counterfeits.” —unknown
“We neither call the Holy Spirit unbegotten, for we know but one unbeggoten and one source of all things, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, nor do we call Him begotten, for we are taught by the tradition of the faith that there is one only-begotten. Rather, we have been taught that the Spirit of Truth proceeds from the Father and confess that He comes from God in an uncreated fashion.” —St. Basil the Great (Letter 125, PG 32.549c)
“In the history of the human race there have been three principal falls: that of Adam, that of Judas, and that of the pope.” —St. Justin Popovich “They [Rome] do not know and do not wish to know the truth; they argue with those who proclaim the truth to them, and assert their heresy.” —St. Basil the Great
“Even if the whole universe holds communion with the [heretical] patriarch, I will not communicate with him. For I know from the writings of the holy Apostle Paul: the Holy Spirit declares that even the angels would be anathema if they should begin to preach another Gospel, introducing some new teaching.” —St. Maximus the Confessor, The Life of St. Maximus the Confessor
“Those who do not belong to the Truth do not belong to the Church of Christ either; and all the more so, if they speak falsely of themselves by calling themselves, or calling each other, holy pastors and hierarchs; [for it has been instilled in us that] Christianity is characterized not by persons, but by the truth and exactitude of Faith.” —St. Gregory Palamas
“Chrysostomos loudly declares not only heretics, but also those who have communion with them, to be enemies of God.” —St. Theodore the Studite, Epistle of Abbot Theophilus
“How long shall we continue in this manner, our intellect reduced to futility, failing to make the spirit of the Gospel our own, not knowing what it means to live according to our conscience, making no serious effort to keep it pure?” —St. Mark the Ascetic
“It is self evident, however, that sincere Christians who are Roman Catholics, or Lutherans, or members of other non-Orthodox confessions, cannot be termed renegades or heretics—i.e. those who knowingly pervert the truth… They have been born and raised and are living according to the creed which they have inherited, just as do the majority of you who are Orthodox; in their lives there has not been a moment of personal and conscious renunciation of Orthodoxy. The Lord, ‘Who will have all men to be saved’ (I Tim. 2:4) and ‘Who enlightens every man born into the world’ (Jn. 1.43), undoubtedly is leading them also towards salvation in His own way.” —Metropolitan Philaret of New York “You ask, will the heterodox be saved… Why do you worry about them? They have a Saviour Who desires the salvation of every human being. He will take care of them. You and I should not be burdened with such a concern. Study yourself and your own sins… I will tell you one thing, however: should you, being Orthodox and possessing the Truth in its fullness, betray Orthodoxy, and enter a different faith, you will lose your soul forever.” —St. Theophan the Recluse “The Orthodox confess that SHE IS the One, Holy, Universal (katholikos) and Apostolic Ecclesia! Any other model is gnostic.” —St. Irenaeusof Lyons
“Orthodoxy is what Christ taught, the apostles preached, and the Fathers kept.” —St. Athanasius of Alexandria
“I beseech you to do and to carry out good to all men with care and assiduity, becoming all things to all men, as the need of each is shown to you; I want and pray you to be wholly harsh and implacable with the heretics only in regard to cooperating with them or in any way whatever supporting their deranged belief. For I reckon it hatred towards man and a departure from Divine love to lend support to error, so that those previously seized by it might be even more greatly corrupted.” —St. Maximus the Confessor, Patrologia Graeca, Vol. 91
“Genuine love is displayed, not by the common table, nor by lofty addresses or flattering words, but by the correcting and the seeking of the benefit of one's neighbour and the lifting up of the one who has fallen.” —St. John Chrysostom
“Never, never, never let anyone tell you that, in order to be Orthodox, you must also be eastern. The West was Orthodox for a thousand years, and her venerable liturgy is far older than any of her heresies.” —St. John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco
“The candles lit before icons of saints reflect their ardent love for God for Whose sake they gave up everything that man prizes in life, including their very lives, as did the holy apostles, martyrs and others. These candles also mean that these saints are lamps burning for us and providing light for us by their own saintly living, their virtues and their ardent intercession for us before God through their constant prayers by day and night. The burning candles also stand for our ardent zeal and the sincere sacrifice we make out of reverence and gratitude to them for their solicitude on our behalf before God.” —St. John of Kronstadt
“The saints of God live even after their death. Thus, I often hear in church the Mother of God singing her wonderful, heart-penetrating song which she said in the house of her cousin Elizabeth, after the Annunciation of the Archangel. At times, I hear the song of Moses; the song of Zacharias--the father of the Forerunner; that of Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel; that of the three children; and that of Miriam. And how many holy singers of the New Testament delight until now the ear of the whole Church of God! And the Divine service itself--the sacraments, the rites? Whose spirit is there, moving and touching our hearts? That of God and of His saints.” —St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ
“Each person is an icon of God, of God in heaven and of God on the cross. Yet, each person is also an icon of the Mother of God, who bears Christ through the Holy Spirit. Our soul, therefore, unites itself in two images; participating in the principles and realities of both Christ and his Mother. These are age old archetypes, symbols by which the soul orients itself on the journey.” —St. Maria Skobtsova, On The Imitation of the Mother of God
“The Christian who does not feel that the Virgin Mary is his or her mother is an orphan.” —Pope Francis
“Creating man according to his image, God diffused into man's very being the longing for the divine infinitude of life, of knowledge, and of perfection. It is precisely for this reason that the immeasurable longing and thirst of humanity is not able to be completely satisfied by anything or anyone except God. Declaring divine perfection as the main purpose for humanity's existence in the world – ‘Be ye therefore perfect, even as your father who is in heaven is perfect.’ (Matth. 5: 48) – Christ, the Savior, answered the most elemental demand and need of our God-like and God-longing humanity.” —St. Justin Popovich, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, Highest Value and Last Criterion in Orthodoxy
“Concerning the charge of idolatry: Icons are not idols but symbols. Therefore, when an Orthodox venerates an icon, he is not guilty of idolatry. He is not worshiping the symbol, but merely venerating it. Such veneration is not directed toward wood, or paint or stone, but towards the person depicted. Therefore relative honor is shown to material objects, but worship is due to God alone.” —St. John of Damascus
“If we could look into each others hearts, and understand the unique challenges each of us faces, I think we would treat each other much more gently, with more love, patience, tolerance, and care.” —Marvin J. Ashton
“Teach me to feel another's woe, to hide the fault I see; that mercy I to others show, that mercy show to me.” —Alexander Pope
“The human heart can see what is hidden to the eyes, and the heart knows things that the mind does not begin to understand.” —They Might Be Giants (1971)
“God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself because it is not there. There is no such thing.” —C. S. Lewis
“The supreme happiness of life is the conviction of being loved for yourself, or more correctly, being loved in spite of yourself.”—Victor Hugo
“It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose him as an alternative to hell.” —C. S. Lewis
“If we have obtained the grace of God, none shall prevail against us, but we shall be stronger than all who oppose us.” —St. John Chrysostom
“But our opinion is in accordance with the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn establishes our opinion.” —St. Irenaeusof Lyons, Against Heresies, 4:18:5
“If the poison of pride is swelling up in you, turn to the Eucharist; and that Bread, Which is your God humbling and disguising Himself, will teach you humility. If the fever of selfish greed rages in you, feed on this Bread; and you will learn generosity. If the cold wind of coveting withers you, hasten to the Bread of Angels; and charity will come to blossom in your heart. If you feel the itch of intemperance, nourish yourself with the Flesh and Blood of Christ, Who practiced heroic self-control during His earthly life; and you will become temperate. If you are lazy and sluggish about spiritual things, strengthen yourself with this heavenly Food; and you will grow fervent. Lastly, if you feel scorched by the fever of impurity, go to the banquet of the Angels; and the spotless Flesh of Christ will make you pure and chaste.” —St. Cyril of Alexandria
“Christians, above all men, are forbidden to correct the stumblings of sinners by force… it is necessary to make a man better not by force but by persuasion. God gives the crown to those who are kept from evil, not by force, but by choice.” —St. John Chrysostom
“I have seen pride lead to humility. And I remembered him who said: Who hath known the mind of the Lord? The pit and offspring of conceit is a fall; but a fall is often an occasion of humility for those who are willing to use it to their advantage.” —St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 15, Section 38
“Modern society calls the beggar bum and panhandler and gives him the bum's rush. But the Greeks used to say that people in need are the ambassadors of the gods.” —Peter Maurin
“Every family should have a room where Christ is welcome in the person of the hungry and thirsty stranger.” —St. John Chrysostom
“Who is the greedy man? One for whom plenty does not suffice. Who defrauds others? One who keeps for himself what belongs to everyone. Aren’t you greedy, don’t you defraud, when you keep for yourself what was given to give away? When someone steals a man’s clothes, we call him a thief. Shouldn’t we give the same name to one who could clothe the naked and does not?” —St. Basil the Great
“The perfect person does not only try to avoid evil. Nor does he do good for fear of punishment, still less in order to qualify for the hope of a promised reward. The perfect person does good through love. His actions are not motivated by desire for personal benefit, so he does not have personal advantage as his aim. But as soon as he has realized the beauty of doing good, he does it with all his energies and in all that he does. He is not interested in fame, or a good reputation, or a human or divine reward. The rule of life for a perfect person is to be in the image and likeness of God.” —St. Clement of Alexandria
“Every day at nightfall, before sleep comes upon you, excite the judgment of your conscience, demand an account from it, and whatever evil counsels you may have taken during the day … pierce them, tear them to pieces, and do penance for them.” —St. John Chrysostom
“Do not leave unobliterated any fault, however small, for it may lead you on to greater sins.” —St. Mark the Ascetic
“Everyday I lay a foundation for building my repentance, and again with my own hands I demolish it.” —St. Ephrem the Syrian
“Having fulfilled a commandment, expect temptations; because love toward Christ is tested by difficulties.” —St. Mark the Ascetic
“Do not be surprised that when you draw near to virtue, grievous and intense tribulations come to you on all sides: for virtue is not considered virtue, if it does not involve hard work.” —St. Isaac the Syrian, Directions on Spiritual Training, The Philokalia
“Do not be surprised that you fall every day; do not give up, but stand your ground courageously. And assuredly, the angel who guards you will honor your patience.” —St. John Climacus
“The life of the righteous was radiant. How did it become radiant if it wasn’t by patience? Love patience, O monk, as the mother of courage.” —St. Ephrem the Syrian
“…should we fall, we should not despair and so estrange ourselves from the Lord's love. For if He so chooses, He can deal mercifully with our weakness. Only we should not cut ourselves off from Him or feel oppressed when constrained by His commandments, nor should we lose heart when we fall short of our goal…let us always be ready to make a new start. If you fall, rise up. If you fall again, rise up again. Only do not abandon your Physician, lest you be condemned as worse than a suicide because of your despair. Wait on Him, and He will be merciful, either reforming you, or sending you trials, or through some other provision of which you are ignorant.” —St. Peter of Damascus
“Faintness of heart is a sign of despondency, and negligence is the mother of both. A cowardly man shows that he suffers from two diseases: love of his flesh and lack of faith; for love of one’s flesh is a sign of unbelief. But he who despises the love of the flesh proves that he believes in God with his whole heart and awaits the age to come … A courageous heart and scorn of perils comes from one of two causes: either from hardness of heart or from great faith in God. Pride accompanies hardness of heart, but humility accompanies faith. A man cannot acquire hope in God unless he first does His will with exactness. For hope in God and manliness of heart are born of the testimony of the conscience, and by the truthful testimony of the mind we possess confidence towards God.” —St. Isaac the Syrian, Homily 40
“So in every test, let us say: "Thank you, my God, because this was needed for my salvation."” —Elder Paisios of Mount Athos
