with all your heart
“Let us love God at least as much as we respect our friends.”
Saint John Climacus
the Ladder of Divine Ascent
perfect love
“He has as yet no perfect love, whose disposition towards men depends on what they are like, loving one ad despising another for this or that, or sometimes loving and sometimes hating one and the same man. Blessed is the man who can love all men equally.”
Saint Maximos the Confessor
First Century on Love
on the soul
The human heart is not a splinter, and the human soul – not a cheap thing; it is more valuable than all the world. All the treasures on earth and in the universe are not worth one Christian soul.
Saint Anatoly
Living Without Hypocrisy: Spiritual Counsels of the Holy Elders of Optina
practice temperance
“We must not allow anything of temporal value to steal our hearts. Every time we direct our hopes toward earthly things we make a step backward on our journey toward God.”
Inner River: A Pilgrimage to the Heart of Christian Spirituality
one humble word
“One word of a humble and [spiritually] experienced man that is painfully born from the depths of his heart has greater worth than a bunch of clever sayings of an external man’s that come out quickly from his educated mouth. His words don’t speak truth to the souls of men, for they are fleshy words and not the fire of the flames of Pentecost.”
Saint Paisios
machiavelli was wrong
“The Staretz believed that evil always proceeds by means of deceit, camouflaging itself as good, whereas good in order to realize itself does not need the cooperation of evil. Therefore as soon as wrong means – magic, lying, violence and the like – make their appearance one is entering a domain alien to the spirit of Christ. Good is not attained by evil means and the end does not justify the means.
Good not obtained by good means is not good.
This is the testament that we have received from the Apostles and Holy Fathers. Although good frequently triumphs and by its appearance rectifies evil this does not mean that evil has led to good and that good has come out of evil.
That is impossible.
But the power of God is such that, where it appears, it heals all things so wholly that no scar remains – the damage caused by evil is effaced – for God is the fullness of life and creates life from nothing”
from the book : The Monk of Mount Athos
Archimandrite Sophrony
eternity and liturgy
Saint John Cabasilas says, “The Liturgy is a portrait of the life of Christ and is an expression also of the gratitude of man for everything God has done. By performing this act we are given grace and that grace helps us to an eternal event which is always present : in eternity there is no past and no future, there is the eternal “today”, the eternal present.”
from the book
The Enlargement of the Heart
Archimandrite Zacharias
draw living water
“Those who store grievances and rancor in themselves are like people who draw water and pour it into a cask with holes.”
Evagrios the Solitary
holy humility
gladsomelife.com 