Christian Monks

"Let us guard our senses, not allowing them to be the channel for sin to enter into the cell of the soul."

"Indulging sinful and vain desires always leads to obsession with them, and after the obsession comes slavery, which is death to everything spiritual. Those who allowed themselves to follow their desires and carnal mind became obsessed with them, enslaved by them, forgot God and eternity, and waster their earthly lives pointlessly, dying an eternal death."

"Even in Eden, the mind tried to acquire knowledge without wisdom and attentiveness, and the knowledge proved to be lethal!"

"Our heart distracts us when it inclines to the fulfillment of its own fallen desires, when it leaves the path of God's will."

"The world pushes us off course because it serves vanity and death and tries to force everyone else to serve its fallen masters, sometimes with kind words, sometimes with outright persecution.."

"The light of Christ's teaching is heavy and intolerable for the sons of the world. They run from it into their dark, soundless pits—into distraction, into various earthly pastimes, into carnal pleasures. There, in their moral darkness, they live their earthly life with no spiritual, eternal goals."

"Earthly wealth does not belong to us, as those who have never thought about this erroneously believe. Otherwise, it always and forever would remain in our possession. But it changes hands constantly, thereby proving that it is given only for us to watch over temporarily."

"Despair is a mortal sin; it is the rejection of an active, living faith in Christ."

"All the saints assiduously avoided distraction. Constantly, or at the very least as often as possible, they concentrated their thoughts within themselves, paying attention to every movement of the mind and heart, directing these according to the commands of the Gospels."

"Those who desire to learn attentiveness must reject all empty activity in their lives."

"The fall has become so assimilated to the essence of all mankind that rejection of the fall has become tantamount to rejection of our very life."

"Wealth belongs to God; man is only the temporary caretaker. A faithful caretaker will follow exactly the wishes of the one who has entrusted the wealth to him. And we, temporarily ruling over the wealth given to us, must rule over it according to the will of God. Let us not use it as a means of indulging our desires and passions, as a resource for eternal perdition. Let us use it for the good of mankind, which lives in need and suffering."

"The Lord came to the earth to save sinners, and so he expects an inevitable admission of sinfulness from every person; judging one's neighbor is a rejection of this acknowledgement."

"Brothers! Let us study the all-powerful and life-giving commandments of our great God, Creator, and Redeemer. Let us learn them assiduously, by word and by life. They are read in the holy Gospels, but they are known only as much as they are done in actual fact."

"Our helmsman, the mind, sometimes loses his way and takes our whole life along with him down the wrong path."

"As someone who is in one mind and heart with the Holy Fathers, you will be saved."

"The books of the Holy Fathers, according to the words of one of their number, are like a mirror—the soul who looks at them often and with attention will be able to see its deficiencies."

"The truth of the scribes and Pharisees contented itself with studying the letter of the Law of God without any corresponding study of the life according to the Law, so instead they led a life contrary to God's Law. As a result of their superficial knowledge, those who limit themselves to studying the letter of the Law fall into pride and conceit."

"Do you want to belong in heaven and to its society; do you want to be a sharer of its blessedness? From this moment, begin to spend your time with the saints. When you leave your mortal body, they will accept you as their own, as an acquaintance, as a friend."

"Consider how wise and careful you must be. Do not gamble with your eternal fate."

"Try to integrate the Gospel into your mind and heart so that your mind will in a manner of speaking, swim in it, live in it. Then your every action will truly become evangelical."

"Do not waste time trying to determine who is right and who is wrong, you or your neighbor. Instead, try to accuse yourself and preserve peace with your neighbor through your humility."

"Conversation and acquaintance with a saint will impart sanctity."

"Let us not foolishly waste our abilities of soul and body; let us not bring them as a sacrifice to the vain and fading world."

"When you read the Gospels, do not seek enjoyment, do not search for exalted feelings, do not try to find brilliant thoughts. Seek instead to perfectly see holy Truth."

"Do not content yourself with unproductive reading of the Gospels; strive to fulfill its commandments, read it with deeds. This is the book of life, and one must read it with one's life."

"The only mind that is healthy is the one that wholly and completely follows the teaching of Christ."

"Do not by any means allow yourself to open both ears to the slanderers and to draw your conclusions and decisions on the basis of what they alone have to say, and thereby judge the case in absentia without the presence of the person slandered to defend himself."

"Pleasure is like a rough file smeared with oil, which when the cat licks it up, it also licks with it the blood of its own tongue."

"He who has felt spiritual love will only despise carnal love, seeing it for the unsightly parody of love that it is."

"If you think that you love God, but in your heart lives an unpleasant disposition toward even one person, you are grievously self-deluded."

"Do you want to learn to love God? Separate yourself from any word, deed, thought and feeling forbidden by the Gospels."

"The spiritual harvest requires a heart that is harrowed by repentance, softened by compunction, and irrigated by tears."

"A desire fulfilled is a desire that will return with twice the demands."

"It is harder to fool the conscience than the mind.The conscience is capable of fighting long and hard against the mind deluded by its love of sin."

"Being offended at the sins of others is a serious spiritual disease."

"Guard your conscience. Do not forget that you are the image and likeness of God, that you are obliged to present this image in purity and holiness to God himself.Woe to you if God will not recognize His image, will not find in it any similarity with Himself! He will utter the dreadful words: "I do not know you.""

"Anda en las vías de tu corazón. Estas vías se destruyen cuando no se usan, como los caminos acá materiales se destruyen no usándose; empero, si se usan, hácense más anchos y muy claros. De esta manera es en las vías del corazón, las cuales tienes destruidas por no las haber usado, y así no es mucho que no sepas andar por ellas. Tórnate, tórnate a ellas, y anden siempre juntamente la persona y el espíritu. No seas como Caín, que se salió de la presencia de Dios y andaba fugitivo y vagabundo por la tierra (Gen 4,14)."

"La amistad y comunicación de Dios es posible en esta vida y destierro. ... Esta amistad o comunicación de Dios al hombre, no por llamarse espiritual deja de tener mucho tomo y certidumbre. ... La comunicación que buscan y hallan las personas que trabajan de llegar a la oración y devoción, la cual es tan cierta, que no hay cosa más cierta en el mundo, ni más gozosa, ni de mayor valor ni precio."

"Man is so made that he cannot be satisfied with less than the highest, and that he must be beaten down before he can be raised up."

"Figgis was fundamentally an unhappy man with a sad history. By nature large, greedy, desperately untidy, kind, lively, gregarious, spontaneous, he suffered through life from a heavy sense of sin and inadequacy. He was manifestly an unconscious homosexual, surrounded by young friends and pupils, uneasy with women unless they were much older and could be met on the intellectual level only. He entered the communal life in a search for the discipline which he believed he needed and could not find within himself. Like many a good College man before and since, he was shamelessly overworked and exploited by colleagues who were only too willing to leave the hard work to the willing horse... From his father to his superior, he was always attaching himself to simpler, stronger men who knew what was good for him; uncoordinated and diffuse in himself, he humbly accepted their guidance, and between them they destroyed him."

"The naturalistic theory of Christianity takes on different colours with the temperament of the speaker. From the hysterical contempt of Nietzsche, the hostility of writers like Mr. Dickinson and Mr. Sturt, we may pass through almost every stage of increasing admiration, with one great proviso, that Jesus is not to be worshipped as God."

"Religion without a Church is not really possible, for not only is man a social animal, but religion is essentially social. And more and more is the comparative study of religion making it clear that men are fundamentally religious."

"True, the Christian Church still lives on. But it is only a living power in small groups. Some of its apparent strength is due to its inherited wealth and to the general lack of education. All this, however, is but for the moment."

"The Gospel is the freshest and most original thing in the world, while the tone of modern intellectualism, with all its culture, is at bottom commonplace and middle aged."

"Christ does not reveal Himself to those who are satisfied. Why should He? They do not want Him."

"It is not to revive of the corpse of past erudition that I have any desire, but rather to make more vivid the life of to-day, and to help us to envisage its problems with a more accurate perspective."

"It is strange what an attraction the Christian Church still possesses even for men who scorn her claims."

"We cannot overestimate the change in men's minds required to produce the ideal of heterogeneity in religion within one State. ... In the Middle Ages politics was a branch of Theology, with whatever admixture derived from Aristotle and the Civil Law. Its basis was theocratic. Machiavelli represents the antithesis of this view, discarding ethical and rural as well as theological Criteria of State action."

"From one point of view we might assert the the Middle Ages ended with the visit of Nogaret to Anagni, and from another it might be said to end only when the troops of Victor Emmanuel entered Rome and the Lord of the world became the prisoner of the Vatican, and of course it ended at different times in different places. Hence arises the extreme difficulty of disentangling the conflicting tendencies and complex political combination of our period."