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“This I give you to share, and to defend all your life, the one Godhead and power, found in the three in unit, and comprising the three separately; not unequal, in substances or natures, neither increased nor diminished by superiorities nor inferiorities; in every respect equal, in every respect the same; just as the beauty and the greatness of the heavens is one; the infinite conjunction of three infinite ones, each God when considered in himself; as the Father, so the Son; as the Son, so “The Lord calls the Holy Spirit; the three one God when contemplated together; each God because consubstantial; one God because 'voice of the monarchiaa gentle breeze'. No sooner do I conceive of the one than I am illumined by the splendor of the three; no sooner do I distinguish them than I am carried back to the one. When I think of anyone of the three I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filledFor God is breath, and the greater part breath of what I am thinking escapes me. I cannot grasp the greatness of that one so as to attribute a greater greatness to the rest. When I contemplate the three together, I see but one torch, and cannot divide or measure out the undivided lightwind is shared by all.” —St. Gregory Maximus the Theologian (Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nazianzus), Orations 40.41, as quoted by Robert Letham, The Holy Trinity, 378Confessor
“The Lord calls “We neither call the Holy Spirit unbegotten, for we know but one unbeggoten and one source of all things, the 'voice Father of a gentle breeze'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. For God is breathRather, and we have been taught that the breath Spirit of Truth proceeds from the wind is shared by allFather and confess that He comes from God in an uncreated fashion.” —St. Maximus Basil the ConfessorGreat, Letter 125, PG 32.549c
“We neither call the “The Holy Spirit unbegotten, for we know but one unbeggoten and one source of all thingsproceeds from the Father, not in the Father manner of our Lord Jesus Christ, nor do we call Him being begotten, for we are taught by but in the tradition manner of the faith that there procession (οὐ γεννητῶς, ἀλλ ἐκπορευτῶς). This is one only-begotten. Rather, we have been taught that a different way of existence as incomprehensible and unknown as the Spirit generation of Truth proceeds from the Father and confess that He comes from God in an uncreated fashionSon.” —St. Basil John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition on the Great (Letter 125Orthodox Faith, 1, 8, PG 3294.549c)816c
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“I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.” —Albert Einstein
“People will never come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” —Aldous Huxley
“When two men [in business] always agree, one of them is unnecessary.” —William Wrigley Jr., The American Magazine, 1931
“Assume the person you're listening to knows something you don't.” —Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
“The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.” —Friedrich Hegel
“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” —Mark Twain
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
“The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.” —Nelson Henderson
“Facts don't care about feelings.” —Ben Shapiro
“There's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.” —Jim Hightower
“People are funny, they want the front of the bus, the middle of the road, and the back of the church.” —Debbie Macomber, Call Me Mrs. Miracle
“Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” —Edward Snowden
“At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us… It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.” —Thomas Merton
The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.” —Alexander Pope (An Essay on Man, Epistle I, 1733)
“Patriotism is as fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave, blind as a stone, and irrational as a headless hen.” —Ambrose Bierce
“A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and a common fear of its neighbors.” —W.R. Inge
“Patriotism means unqualified and unwavering love for the nation, which implies not uncritical eagerness to serve, not support for unjust claims, but frank assessment of its vices and sins, and penitence for them.” —Alexander Solzhenitsyn
“Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.” —George Jean Nathan
“They knew that the tree is known by its fruit and that injustice corrupts a tree, that its fruit withers and shrivels and falls at last to that dark ground of history where other great hopes have rotted and died, where equality and freedom remains still the only choice for wholeness and soundness in a man or in a nation.” —Gentleman's Agreement (1947)
“Faithful copies of a counterfeit original yield only more counterfeits.” —unknown
“To trust God in the light is nothing, but to trust Him in the dark – that is faith.” —Charles Spurgeon
“Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.” —Abraham Joshua Heschel
As long then as I am disobedient and rebellious, both by denial of God and by my passions, so long Christ also is called disobedient on my account. But when all things shall be subdued unto Him on the one hand by acknowledgment of Him, and on the other by a reformation, then He Himself also will have fulfilled His submission, bringing me whom He has saved to God. For this, according to my view, is the subjection of Christ; namely, the fulfilling of the Father's Will. But as the Son subjects all to the Father, so does the Father to the Son; the One by His Work, the Other by His good pleasure, as we have already said. And thus He Who subjects presents to God that which he has subjected, making our condition His own. Of the same kind, it appears to me, is the expression, ‘My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?’ It was not He who was forsaken either by the Father, or by His own Godhead, as some have thought, as if It were afraid of the Passion, and therefore withdrew Itself from Him in His Sufferings (for who compelled Him either to be born on earth at all, or to be lifted up on the Cross?) But as I said, He was in His own Person representing us. For we were the forsaken and despised before, but now by the Sufferings of Him Who could not suffer, we were taken up and saved. Similarly, He makes His own our folly and our transgressions; and says what follows in the Psalm, for it is very evident that the 22nd Psalm refers to Christ.” —St. Gregory the Theologian, On God and Christ, Oration 30, V
“The Father is in the Son, and the Son in the Father, whilst the Holy Ghost proceedeth from the Father and resteth in the Son. But at the same time each Person has Its own particular properties: God the Father is not begotten, not created, does not proceed; the Son is begotten; the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father, whilst the substance of the three Persons is one, a Divine, incomplex substance. This similarity is based upon the words of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, Who calls Himself the Light of the world, and thus speaks of the Holy Ghost, comparing It in Its actions to the element water: ‘He that believeth on Me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. But this spake He of the Spirit, which they that believe on Him should receive.’ 415 He also compared the Holy Ghost to the air or wind: ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.’” —St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ
“For the Father only is Unbegotten, the Son only is Begotten, and the Holy Ghost from Father Proceeding, Co-eternal to the Father and the Son, for there is One Work, and there is One Operation of the Will in the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. The Father Unbegotten, the Son Begotten, and the Holy Ghost from the Father Proceeding, Co-Eternal to the Father and Son; but That One [i.e. the Son] is Born, yet This One [i.e. the Holy Ghost] Proceeds, just as in the Gospel of Blessed John ye read: ‘The Spirit, Who Proceeds from the Father, He shall announce all things to you.’ Therefore the Holy Ghost is neither to be the Father Unbegotten, nor held to be the Son Begotten; but the Holy Ghost, Who from the Father Proceeds.” —St. Mochta of Ireland, "Profession of Faith" of St. Mochta [+535AD]
“For when we mention the Omnipotent Father, the appelation of this Fatherly Name is directed to the Person of the Son, and when we mention the Eternal Son, He is referred to the Person of the Eternal Father; and when we name the Holy Ghost we demonstrate Him to Proceed from the Person of the Eternal Father.” —St. Mansuetus, Letter of St. Mansuetus (Archbishop of Milan) at 679 Synod of Milan to Emperor Constantine IV [+685AD]
“This I give you to share, and to defend all your life, the one Godhead and power, found in the three in unit, and comprising the three separately; not unequal, in substances or natures, neither increased nor diminished by superiorities nor inferiorities; in every respect equal, in every respect the same; just as the beauty and the greatness of the heavens is one; the infinite conjunction of three infinite ones, each God when considered in himself; as the Father, so the Son; as the Son, so the Holy Spirit; the three one God when contemplated together; each God because consubstantial; one God because of the monarchia. No sooner do I conceive of the one than I am illumined by the splendor of the three; no sooner do I distinguish them than I am carried back to the one. When I think of anyone of the three I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me. I cannot grasp the greatness of that one so as to attribute a greater greatness to the rest. When I contemplate the three together, I see but one torch, and cannot divide or measure out the undivided light.” —St. Gregory the Theologian, Orations 40.41, as quoted by Robert Letham, The Holy Trinity, 378
“The power to bear Mysteries, which the humble man has received, which makes him perfect in every virtue without toil, this is the very power which the blessed apostles received in the form of fire. For its sake the Saviour commanded them not to leave Jerusalem until they should receive power from on high, that is to say, the Paraclete, which, being interpreted, is the Spirit of consolation. And this is the Spirit of divine visions. Concerning this it is said in divine Scripture: ‘Mysteries are revealed to the humble’ (Ecclus 3:19). The humble are accounted worthy of receiving in themselves this Spirit of revelations Who teaches mysteries.” —St. Isaac the Syrian, Homily 77
“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, letter to Eusebius of Samosata
“When we Greeks find fault with the filioque, they shake Peter's keys at us… … Nevertheless differences of custom and usage are no sufficient ground for schism. Experience shows that arguing about azyma and Lenten fasts gets nowhere. The Greeks should be accommodating and make concessions to the ignorant western barbarians, hoping that in time they will correct their errors to conform to the apostolic tradition stemming from Jerusalem.” —Blessed Theophylact of Ochrid, On the The Errors of the Latinsin Ecclesiastical Matters
“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
“All the teachers of the Church, and all the Councils, and all the Divine Scriptures advise us to flee from the heterodox and separate from their communion.” —St. Mark of Ephesus
“‘But if,’ they say, ‘we had devised some middle ground between the dogmas (of the Papists and the Orthodox), then thanks to this we would have united with them and accomplished our business superbly, without at all having been forced to say anything except what corresponds to custom and has been handed down (by the Fathers).’ This is precisely the means by which many, from of old, have been deceived and persuaded to follow those who have led them off the steep precipice of impiety; believing that there is some middle ground between the two teachings that can reconcile obvious contradictions, they have been exposed to peril.” —St. Mark of Ephesus, Encyclical Letter, Orthodox Word, March-April-May, 1967
“Whoever preserves himself from them (the Latins) and keeps his faith pure will stand rejoicing at the right hand of God, but whoever willfully draws close to them will stand weeping bitterly with them on the left. For there is no eternal life for those living in the faith of the Latins or the Saracens…
If someone says to you: ‘Both your and our faith are from God’, you child, must reply to him as follows: ‘Who are you, you heretic? Do you think that God has two faiths? Have you not heard, accursed and perverted as you are by an evil faith that which is written: Thus saith the Lord: one Lord, one faith, one baptism…’
Thus they of evil faith, after holding to the Orthodox faith for so many years, have turned away to an evil faith and to Satan's teaching…
They have renounced the preaching of the apostles and the edification of the holy fathers, and have accepted a faith based on error and a perverted dogma leading to perdition. Therefore, they have been torn away from us and set apart…” —St. Theodosius of Kiev, 11th century
“That only the canonical Scriptures have infallibility is testified by Blessed Augustine in the words which he writes to Jerome: ‘It is fitting to bestow such honour and veneration only to the books of Scripture which are called 'canonical,' for I absolutely believe that none of the authors who wrote them erred in anything. … As for other writings, no matter how great was the excellence of their authors in sanctity and learning, in reading them I do not accept their teaching as true solely on the basis that they thus wrote and thought.’ Then, in a letter to Fortunatus [St. Mark continues in his citations of Augustine] he writes the following: ‘We should not hold the judgment of a man, even though this man might have been orthodox and had an high reputation, as the same kind of authority as the canonical Scriptures, to the extent of considering it inadmissible for us, out of the reverence we owe such men, to disapprove and reject something in their writing if we should happen to discover that they taught other than the truth which, with God's help, has been attained by others or by ourselves. This is how I am with regard to the writings of other men; and I desire that the reader will act thus with regard to my writings also.’” —St. Mark of Ephesus, Second Homily on Purgatorial Fire, chs. 15-16; Pogodin, pp. 127-132
“The Ecumenism is a huge lie; they speak in the name of a love outside of Christ, which excludes you from the Truth. If the Ecumenists really loved the world, they would not disown the truth of the value and the spiritual richness of Church Tradition and of the Holy Fathers. They disown Christianity from the gracious beauty. God has left from them, what remains is only their ego. No, we don’t need You. We lead the world, we rule the world, we give the bread, we give the happiness on this earth. Jesus must be arrested again not to disturb our march. Eliminating God from the world and of the soul in any way – this is the goal of the Ecumenism also repelled by Saint Justin Popovich. The Ecumenism and the globalization are at the forefront of the apocalyptic times. They want to accustom the eye and the spirit of the Orthodox with the habit to serve together with these heretics, until they get to have Communion from the same chalice. Because this could give them the right to build their own churches. But no, they want strategically to compromise the shrines and the faint hearted priests who are quick to “obedience”. The Ecumenists have the false impression that they will bring something new in the Church of Christ. Let us not forget that the Church is the body whose head is Christ. You can not break it from Christ Who is the Path, the Truth and the Life. The Ecumenists will not fulfill anything. You can not change the reality according to the human interests. The divine reality remains the same in every age. The Holy Spirit speaks through the mouths of the bearers of God, not of the bearers of human interests. The Christian Church has never gone after the crowd; not the many lead or hold the truth, but the few, chosen, as the carriers of the Holy Spirit. We do work only under this Father’s truth, the Gospel of our Lord and the Orthodox Church Tradition. All this falsehood which has appeared in our world has no other purpose than to embarrass and undermine the whole tradition and the beliefs of a nation. Questions are not posed and answers are not given, and people take for granted everything that has been written at the official level. But, by not solving these dogmatic problems the untruth slowly settles in our Orthodox Christian Church. All the Ecumenical attempts of unifying the other Christian communities found in heresy, the dialogues which have developed in our Orthodox Christian Church, since I know, haven’t got any result because they have false basis, they are untrue and do nothing but disturb the authentic Christian life.” —Elder Justin (Pârvu) of Romania, Din învățăturile și minunile Părintelui Justin
“In our evil time, when the servants of the coming Antichrist are putting forth all their efforts so as to undermine and replace authentic Orthodoxy with a false ‘Orthodoxy’ - an Orthodoxy only in name, there have appeared not a few ‘pastors’ also who bear only the name of Orthodox but deny the authentic power and spirit of true Orthodoxy. Precisely such false pastors filled up the ranks of the (Soviet) ‘Living Church’ and the ‘Renovationist Church’ clergy in our Russia.
But the ‘Living Church’ and ‘Renovationalism’ were not recognized by the believing Russian people, who felt in their hearts their whole falsity; and they brilliantly collapsed on the Russian soil, ceasing their official existence. However, the spirit of the ‘Living Church’ and ‘Renovationalism’ has not died, but has continued and up until now continues to live among us also in the Russian homeland, which has been enslaved by the godless, and also abroad among all the Orthodox Local Churches who have become infected with this
pestilential spirit, not without, of course, the most strenuous cooperation of those same servants of the coming Antichrist.
These pseudo-pastors, modernists and ecumenists, in place of true Orthodoxy, preach and insistently propagandize a false Orthodoxy, flattering all the sinful passions and vices of fallen man - striving in everything to go in step with the times and to adapt the Christian to the ‘world which lies in evil,’ under all possible cunning and well sounding pretexts. Everywhere now they are seizing the reigns of government in the contemporary Orthodox Local Churches. They are striving to play everywhere the leading guiding role, and often they have success, for they skillfully and cunningly make themselves seem to be zealots of Orthodoxy.
But their actual aim is to undermine true Orthodoxy by a false ‘Orthodoxy,’ in order to make it come about, in the expression of Christ the Savior, ‘that the salt has lost its savor’ (Matthew 5:13), that it might lose its saltiness - that it might lose its spirit and power. This is a special kind of battle against the Church!
Behold of what a frightful undertaking (of which) we are the living and immediate witnesses! By all means there is being conducted in the world a frightful battle against the Faith of Christ, by a path of falsification and imitations!
…(this) truly most frightful and nightmarish phenomenon (is) something more frightful than open atheism and warfare against God, (for it) threatens to destroy our holy Orthodoxy from the root, having corrupted it from within…” —Vladyka Averky of Jordanville
“Being born, then, of the light of truth, shun division and bad doctrines. Where the shepherd is, there you, being sheep, must follow. For many wolves there are, apparently worthy of confidence, who with the bait of baneful pleasure seek to capture the runners in God's race; but if you stand united they will have no success…” —St. Ignatius of Antioch
“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 ” —Victor Hugo
“It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose him as an alternative to hell.” —C. S. Lewis
“My joy, I beg you, acquire the Spirit of Peace. That means to bring oneself to such a state that our spirit will not be disturbed by anything. For one must go through many sorrows to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. This is the way all righteous men were saved and inherited the Heavenly Kingdom…” —St. Seraphim of Sarov
“My will, therefore, He took to Himself, my grief. In confidence I call it grief, because I preach His Cross. Mine is the will which He called His Own, for as Man He bore my grief, as Man He spake, and therefore said, ‘Not as I will, but as Thou wilt.’ Mine was the grief, and mine the heaviness with which He bore it, for no man exults when at the point to die. With me and for me He Suffers, for me He is sad, for me He is heavy. In my stead therefore, and in me He grieved Who had no cause to grieve for Himself.
Not Thy Wound, but mine, hurt Thee, Lord Jesus; not Thy Death, but our weakness, even as the Prophet saith: ‘For He is afflicted for our sakes’--and we, Lord, esteemed Thee afflicted, when Thou grievedst not for Thyself, but for me.
And what wonder if He grieved for all, Who wept for one? What wonder if, in the hour of death, He is heavy for all, Who wept when at the point to raise Lazarus from the dead? Then, indeed, He was moved by a loving sister's tears, for they touched His human heart,--here by secret grief He brought it to pass that, even as His Death made an end of death, and His Stripes healed our scars, so also His Sorrow took away our sorrow.” —St. Ambrose of Milan, (+397), Ch. 7, Book II, Exposition on the Christian Faith
“Peace is not absence of struggle, but absence of uncertainty and confusion.” —Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Sourozh
“A sinful soul, full of passions, cannot have peace and rejoice in the Lord, even if it had charge over all earthly riches, even if it ruled over the whole world. If it was suddenly said to such a king, happily feasting and sitting on his throne, 'King, now you will die,' his soul would be troubled and he would tremble with fear, and he would see his powerlessness. But how many beggars there are, whose only wealth is love for God, and who, if you said to them, 'You will die now,' would answer peacefully, 'Let God's will be done. Glory to the Lord, that He has remembered me and wants to take me to Himself.'” —St. Silouan the Athonite
“To reach satisfaction in all
desire its possession in nothing.
To come to possession in all
desire the possession of nothing.
To arrive at being all
desire to be nothing.
To come to the knowledge of all
desire the knowledge of nothing.
To come to the pleasure you have not
you must go by the way in which you enjoy not.
To come to the knowledge you have not
you must go by the way in which you know not.
To come to the possession you have not
you must go by the way in which you possess not.
To come by the what you are not
you must go by a way in which you are not.
When you turn toward something
you cease to cast yourself upon the all.
For to go from all to the all
you must deny yourself of all in all.
And when you come to the possession of the all
you must possess it without wanting anything.
Because if you desire to have something in all
your treasure in God is not purely your all.” —St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel
“Man’s will, out of cowardice, tends away from suffering, and man, against his own will, remains utterly dominated by the fear of death, and, in his desire to live, clings to his slavery to pleasure.” —St. Maximus the Confessor
“Never confuse the person, formed in the image of God, with the evil that is in him: because evil is but a chance misfortune, an illness, a devilish reverie. But the very essence of the person is the image of God, and this remains in him despite every disfigurement.” —St. John of Kronstadt
“For this reason, the man who lives by God's standards and not by man's, must need needs be a lover of the good, and it follows that he must hate what is evil. Further, since no one is evil by nature, but anyone who is evil is evil because of a perversion of nature, the man who lives by God's standards has a duty of ‘perfect hatred’ (Psalm 139:22) towards those who are evil; that is to say, he should not hate the person because of the fault, nor should he love the fault because of the person. He should hate the fault, but love the man. And when the fault has been cured there will remain only what he ought to love, nothing that he should hate.” —St. Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, 14:6, Penguin ed., transl. Bettenson
“As Jesus Christ is my Witness, I profess that I hate heresy, not the heretic; but as is proper, for the present I shun the heretics because of the heresy, since I have both convicted and rebuked him. Let him renounce his heresy and condemn it by word as well as by deed, and he will cling to all men by the bond of brotherhood, because it is written, ‘Bear ye one another's burden and so fulfill the law of Christ’ (Gal. 6:2).” —Orosius of Braga, Book in Defense Against the Pelagians
Therefore fight against every worldly enticement, against every material enticement that hinders you from fulfilling Christ’s commandments, love God with all your heart, and care with all your strength for the salvation of your own soul, and the souls of others, be soul-loving.” —St. John of Kronstadt
“[R]eal Orthodox can never be chauvinists. I recall once, in a conversation with me in 1926, the blessedly reposed metropolitan [A. Khrapovitsky] related to me the following: "On Athos there is a custom that a monk who does not forgive offences is punished by being made to omit the words ‘and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,’ at the reading of the Lord’s Prayer, until such a time when he has forgiven the offence committed against him. And I myself have suggested," added the great saint, "that the chauvinist-nationalists not read the ninth article of the Symbol of Faith."
If we were to crystallize this principle of Vladyka, it would read as follows: the Russian, Serbian, and Bulgarian nations can be great only if the goal of their existence be the collective realization of the commandments of the Gospel. Otherwise, "Serbianism", "Russianism", and "Bulgarianism", are reduced to senseless and pernicious chauvinism. If "Serbianism" flourishes not by the power of evangelical podvigs and not to Orthodox catholicity, then it will choke in its own egoistic chauvinism. What is profitable for Serbdom is profitable for other nationalities as well. Nations pass, the Gospel is eternal. Only in so far as a nation is filled with the eternal evangelical truth and righteousness, does it exist, and itself becomes and remains eternal. Only such patriotism can be justified from an evangelical point of view. This is the patriotism of the holy apostles, the holy martyrs, the holy fathers. When the emperor-tormentor asked the holy martyrs Acindynus, Pegasius, and Anempodistus where they were from, they answered: "Are you asking us, O Emperor, about our homeland? Our homeland and our life is the most holy, consubstantial and undivided Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the one God." (On Met. Anthony Khrapovitsky)
The blessed Metropolitan Anthony is the most gifted contemporary representative of Russian Orthodox nationalism, a nationalism consecrated and enlightened by Christ; a nationalism by which all men are brothers in Christ; a nationalism by which the mighty must serve the weak, the wise the unwise, the humble the proud, the first the last. Growing out of patristic Orthodox universal patriotism, the blessed Vladyka can only be appreciated from the same apostolic patristic perspective. We can apply to him what St. Gregory of Nyssa said about his own brother, St. Basil, after his death: "Wherein lies Basil's noble origin? Where is his homeland? His origin is his affinity to divinity, and his homeland is virtue."” —St. Justin Popovich
“Worldly glory does not lead God's children to heaven.” —St. Raphael, the Newly-revealed Martyr of Lesvos
“The work of righteousness will be peace,
And the effect of righteousness, quietness and assurance forever.” —Isaiah 32:17
“Children’s children are the crown of old men,
And the glory of children is their father.” —Proverbs 17:6
“The righteous man walks in his integrity;
His children are blessed after him.” —Proverbs 20:7
“The father of the righteous will greatly rejoice,
And he who begets a wise child will delight in him.” —Proverbs 23:24
“Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord,
The fruit of the womb is a reward.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior,
So are the children of one’s youth.
Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them;
They shall not be ashamed,
But shall speak with their enemies in the gate.” —Psalm 127:3-5
“The sons of wisdom are the church of the just: and their generation, obedience and love.
Children, hear the judgment of your father, and so do that you may be saved.
For God hath made the father honourable to the children: and seeking the judgment of the mothers, hath confirmed it upon the children.
He that loves God, shall obtain pardon for his sins by prayer, and shall refrain himself from them, and shall be heard in the prayer of days.
And he that honours his mother is as one that lays up a treasure.
He that honours his father shall have joy in his own children, and in the day of his prayer he shall be heard.
He that honours his father shall enjoy a long life: and he that obeys the father, shall be a comfort to his mother.
He that fears the Lord, honours his parents, and will serve them as his masters that brought him into the world.” —Sirach 3:1-8
“But Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.’” —Matthew 19:14
“Reflect on the statutes of the Lord,
