mystics

"Love without thinking: love is simple. Love will never make a mistake."

"The Lutherans say: “Why should we ask for the prayers of the saints for ourselves? We ask God Himself”—and they contradict themselves: for why do they ask the pastor to pray for them? They would pray without a pastor if everyone had the same access to God and there was no need for sanctified intercessors for us. — What blindness! — They say: by praying to the saints, we are idolaters. That is not true. We do not honor a single saint as God, we do not pray to a single saint as God, but only ask for his prayers for us; is there even a shadow of idolatry here? — Just as we ask living ministers and intercessors for us before God to pray for us, so we also ask the heavenly intercessors, who have great boldness before Him due to their love for God; moreover, many of them were intercessors and advocates for the world before God even here on Earth; there, in heaven, their activity only continues, has larger dimensions, and is especially strong, because it is not hindered by heavy and sluggish flesh. — All the saints, although they have finished their earthly course, are alive: “For He is not a God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to Him” (Luke 20:38)."

"The Jesuits, to please the Pope and their selfish base views and goals, distorted the law of conscience and the law of the Gospel, asserting that to achieve selfish or religious goals, Catholics can use any illegal means."

"The Lord is the perfect Possessor and Master of all creation."

"Leo Tolstoy and writers like him, whose number is countless, have appeared and live on Earth to cloud and corrupt with their godlessness, faithlessness, and anarchy the multitude of people who follow them and read their blasphemous writings. Lord, destroy them from the Earth or turn them to faith, humble their demonic pride!"

"The Orthodox Church with its divine service educates us to be citizens of heaven by teaching us every virtue, which is exemplified by the life of the Mother of God and all the saints, and by cleansing, sanctifying, and deifying us in the sacraments."

"Icons are the Church's response to the crying need of our nature."

"It has been calculated astronomically that the distance from the Earth to the Sun is one hundred and fifty million versts (approximately 160 million km)."

"Often, prayer is called something that is not prayer at all: a person went to church, stood there, looked at the icons, or first at the people, at their faces, their outfits, and says: I prayed to God; stood at home in front of an icon, nodded his head, said memorized words without understanding or sympathy, and says: I prayed to God."

"Humility is the foundation of all virtues."

"Our life is a child's game, but not an innocent one, but a sinful one, because with a strong mind and knowledge of the purpose of our life, we neglect this purpose and engage in empty, aimless affairs."

"Pride is a demon; malice is the same demon; envy is the same demon; lewd filth is the same demon; forced blasphemy is the same demon; forced doubt in the truth is a demon; despondency is a demon; there are various passions, but in all of them one Satan acts; various passions, but together they are the barking of Satan in various ways, and a person becomes one, one spirit with Satan."

"God is the creative, living, and life-giving Thought."

"God is Spirit, a simple Being."

"At night, our soul is free from worldly vanity, and therefore the spiritual world can freely act upon it, and it can freely accept its impressions."

"Forced prayer develops sanctimony."

"Every person on Earth is sick with the fever of sin, with the blindness of sin, possessed by the rage of sin; and since sin consists primarily of malice and pride, every person, as one suffering from the illness of sin, must be treated with gentle love—an important truth that we often forget; we often, very often, act contrary to it: to malice, we add malice with our own bitterness; to pride, we oppose with pride. This is how evil grows, rather than diminishes; it is not cured, but becomes more infected. Lord, have mercy on us, have mercy on humanity!"

"Gluttony is the seed of decay and destruction of the soul."

"One of the most powerful deceits of the devil is the weakening of the heart with laziness, and with it, all spiritual and physical forces; faith, hope, and love dry up in the heart, and you become faithless, despondent, and insensible to God and to people—like salt that has lost its savor."

"All Israel shall be saved (Rom. 11:26), all Israel, that is, the true Israelites, like Nathanael, of whom the Lord said: “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!” (John 1:47). These are the Israelites who will be saved. The majority of Jews, because of their cunning and countless unrepented evil deeds, will perish. Change quickly with a good change, every Christian, as long as the doors of God’s mercy are not closed to you. Do works of mercy, while it is day; the night is coming, when no one can work (John 9:4)."

"Always consider it a great blessing to converse in prayer with the Lord, or with the Most Pure Lady, the Mother of God, or with Angels, or with holy people, and pray to Them always with joy and with a tremble of reverence, remembering with Whom you, an unclean and insignificant worm, are speaking."

"The body is only the material shell of the soul, its house."

"A person subject to passions, what do you need? Life, you say. Why are you striving? For life. But are you living a true life? Reason and experience compel me to say no. So, what constitutes your life? Faith, hope, and love—reason and experience tell me. The life of our soul is God, a living faith in Him, and love for Him, love for people like me—they are the peace and breadth of my heart, without them I am a martyr of sin, a slave, a captive of passions; my life passes in sorrow and distress."

"The character of the present, temporary life is delusion."

"The life of the heart is love; its death is malice and enmity against a brother."

"A neighbor is a being equal to me, the same human as I, the very image of God."

"Heed: for the purification of your heart from sins, you will receive an infinite reward—you will see God, your all-good Creator, your Provider. The struggle to cleanse the heart is difficult because it is accompanied by great deprivations and sorrows, but the reward is great."

"Humility is a great virtue, the mother of all virtues, the mother of all blessings."

"The lusts and desires of the flesh, or the old man, are countless, but they are a dream, a vanity, a phantom, nothing."

"Envy in a Christian is madness."

"Democracy is in hell, and in heaven, it is the Kingdom."

"Consider all sweetness as sweepings and filth; do not love anything earthly, do not pity anything earthly for a person, and do not hold enmity against him for anything. Love seeks to please the beloved and to value nothing for his sake."

"Mercy is to love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, to those who assault you, to those who persecute you, to protect the persecuted, and so on."

"The name of the Savior, invoked with faith, works miracles, casts out demons, extinguishes passions, and heals diseases."

"The enemy sometimes acts through evil people."

"Doubt and scorn for the word, like the poison of the spirit of falsehood, must be cut off."

"The death of a true Christian is no more than a sleep until the day of resurrection."

"Demon-possessed individuals are peaceful until they are brought close to a sacred object. When they are, an extraordinary force, a repulsion from the sacred, blasphemy, spitting on the sacred, and a piercing scream emerge from them."

"The flesh flourishes, but the soul withers."

"The fiery catastrophe of the Earth expected at the end of the world could occur from the collision of the Earth with one of the wandering fragments or comets."

"Food and drink should be used only to strengthen one's forces, and not for gluttony."

"Faith is the key to God's treasury."

"God is good and all-good, and you, His image, should be good."

"Orthodox Christians are like a family, the children of Yessou Christ, and in a good family, the mother is always highly respected (the Mother of God), just as older brothers are respected and honored by the younger ones, and these latter imitate the former."

"I am looking for him who has got down to that most unappeasable yearning in his being; to that in him which is such that, so long as everything else comes to him but this comes to him not, then everything that does come to him turns to dust in his hands and ashes in his mouth; to that life in him which is such that once he does find it and does yield himself to it utterly—then, though everything else is taken away from him, though he has to go cold and hungry and alone, though he knows no human being on this earth into whose eyes he can look and find understanding, though everything he has sweated bloody sweat for men bring to what they call failure, and his very life they bring to what they call death, he shall yet be able to go his way softly singing in his heart. To do this is to live; and to fail to do this, no matter how good the reason for the failure may be, is to do what most men do—to die without ever having really lived at all."

"What I am about to say is not intended for everybody. I warn you: it is intended only for those who have ears for it. For others, I would say something very different—possibly the direct opposite. And so, if you do not like what I say, if you find it uninteresting, or in part unintelligible, or offensive, or if, having heard my words, you are one who can forget them, then do not let yourself be overmuch disturbed by them. Do forget them. You are certainly not one of those to whom I am speaking. I am really speaking only to those who have ears for what I have to say—who have, as it seems to me, a rare kind of ear for a rare kind of music."

"Many of our most capable people are spending their powers on trying to salvage human wreckage, on all sorts of life that can never come to anything, and not even on salvaging it, but only on preserving it, on merely keeping alive by artificial means that which ought to die, and which, if left to nature, would die."

"Again I must caution anyone who sets out to follow his deepest life against being too sure that it can be kept within the limits of conventional morality. Let him not take it for granted that men will think him a saint, or even consider him respectable."

"Yet with just a handful of sticks one can sometimes start quite a fire. It has already so happened on this earth more than once. But where is the handful of sticks? Where are those few who are willing to burn, and to be burnt up, in order that there may be light in this night, and warmth in this coldness? Where is the fuel which at last has made itself dry and hard, fuel which the flame ever loveth, ever longeth to lick with its love, and to make one with itself? Where is the handful of sticks?"

"For these twenty years Bill Simpson has been trying to free himself from every kind of bondage to tradition, convention, property and social responsibility which hinders a man from fulfilling the demand of his own personality and following the gleam which, he believes, is the polar star of a perfectly honest soul."