Every day you provide your bodies with good to keep them from failing. In the same way your good works should be the daily nourishment of your hearts. Your bodies are fed with food and your spirits with good works. You aren’t to deny your soul, which is going to live forever, what you grant to your body, which is going to die.
–Saint Gregory the Great (c. 540-604)
Do not fall into despair because of stumbling. I do not mean that you should not feel contrition for them, but that you should not think them incurable. For it is more expedient to be bruised than dead. There is, indeed, a Healer for the man who has stumbled, even He Who on the Cross asked that mercy be shown to His crucifiers.
–Saint Isaac of Syria (Seventh Century)
We must be firmly convinced that we have nothing of our own, except our vices and sins. We must all be on our guard against pride and empty boasting and beware of worldly or natural wisdom. A worldly spirit loves to talk a lot but does nothing, striving for the exterior signs of holiness that people can see, with no desire for true piety and interior holiness of spirit.
–Saint Francis of Assisi (1181–1226)
[S]piritual life and perfection… consists in nothing but coming near to God and union with Him, as was said in the beginning. With this is connected a heartfelt realization of the goodness and greatness of God, together with consciousness of our own nothingness and our proneness to every evil; love of God and dislike of ourselves; submission not only to God but also to all creatures, for the sake of our love of God; renunciation of all will of our own and perfect obedience to the will of God; and moreover desire for all this and its practice with a pure heart to the glory of God (I Corinthians 10:31), from sheer desire to please God and only because He Himself wishes it and because we should so love Him and work for Him.
–Saint Nikodemos the Hagiorite (1749-1809)
Through prayer we receive a foretaste of heaven and something of paradise comes down upon us. Prayer never leaves us without sweetness. It is honey that flows into the souls and makes all things sweet. When we pray properly, sorrows disappear like snow before the sun.
–Saint John Vianney (1786-1859)
To all who recognize their own sinfulness, remorsefully acknowledge it, and long to be liberated from it, he extends his hand. But he demands that they follow him unconditionally, and renounce everything that can oppose his Spirit within them.
–Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (1891-1942)
