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“It “Those who desire unnecessary comforts and pleasures in this temporal world – which sooner or later will perish – these people prefer other laws, not the laws of the Church but those which allow them to live as they want, to think what they want, to place their own will above the spirit of the Church, that spirit given by the Lord God Himself; and they invite others to follow this same path. It may be, brethren, that soon you will again experience a time of turmoil, and some of you will be called to take the path of denying those sacred laws and to submit to laws established by mere human authority. Beware of such a path! Beware of the path taken by the thief on the left, for by the weight of blasphemy, by the weight of reviling Christ he went to his eternal perdition. Those who revile the laws of the Church revile Christ Himself, Who is the Head of the Church, for the laws of the Church were given by the Holy Spirit through the Apostles. And the laws of local Churches are based on those same laws and canons of the Church. Let us not consider ourselves wiser than those saints and hierarchs who established the rules of the Church; let us not imagine ourselves to be great sages. Rather, let us humbly call out together with the wise thief: Remember me, O Lord, in Thy kingdom!” —St. John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco, Homily on the Sunday of Orthodoxy
“Those who desire unnecessary comforts and pleasures in this temporal world – which sooner or later will perish – these people prefer other laws, not the laws of the Church but those which allow them to live as they want, to think what they want, to place their own will above the spirit of the Church, that spirit given by the Lord God Himself; and they invite others to follow this same path.
It may be, brethren, that soon you will again experience a time of turmoil, and some of you will be called to take the path of denying those sacred laws and to submit to laws established by mere human authority. Beware of such a path! Beware of the path taken by the thief on the left, for by the weight of blasphemy, by the weight of reviling Christ he went to his eternal perdition.
Those who revile the laws of the Church revile Christ Himself, Who is the Head of the Church, for the laws of the Church were given by the Holy Spirit through the Apostles. And the laws of local Churches are based on those same laws and canons of the Church. Let us not consider ourselves wiser than those saints and hierarchs who established the rules of the Church; let us not imagine ourselves to be great sages. Rather, let us humbly call out together with the wise thief: Remember me, O Lord, in Thy kingdom!” —St. John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco
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“You have grown soft. So the worthless have risen up against the honourable, the disreputable against the renowned, the foolish against the wise, the young against the aged. Righteousness and peace are far from you, inasmuch as you have abandoned the fear of God and become blind in faith.” —St. Clement of Rome
“St. John Chrysostom preached: ‘If you are afraid to confront a heretic, tell me and I shall go to stop his mouth.’ But we, alas, have become ‘shamefully indifferent to both good and evil’ as the poet has written. And from this indifference and this self-care does ‘Ecumenism’ reap the fruits of apostasy which are becoming more and more clear. We fail to heed the lesson taught us by St. Nicholas of how we must defend the glory of our Lord God when sacred things are blasphemed and His Name is trodden upon.
Let us remember that Christian love embraces all men; it manifests mercy to everyone and warmly prays that all be saved. But when this love witnesses a willful campaign against Truth, then it burns with a consuming zeal which will not permit such assaults. The example of our holy father St. Nicholas is a shining example of such love, the love which must burn in every Christian heart for our Lord God. ” —Metropolitan Philaret of New York
“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.
Εveryone today seeks happiness on earth, and they think this is ‘Christianity’; true Orthodox Christians know that the age of persecutions, which began again under the Bolsheviks, is still with us, and that only by much sorrow and tribulation are we made fit to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” —Fr. Seraphim Rose of Platina
“Brothers and sisters! Let us aspire towards ascetic labor, in which is expressed precisely the essence of our Orthodox Christian faith, which is the labor of imitating Christ in bearing the cross and self-crucifixion – a faith of labor and, laboring lawfully as the Word of God teaches, let us suffer all things for the Truth, not moving away from it, as do many because of their poverty of spirit or self-interest. And let us remember well: where there is no labor, where there is no steadfastness in the faith – there is neither Orthodoxy nor true faith in God and in His Christ. Amen.” —Archbishop Averky (Taushev) of Syracuse
“The servants of Antichrist more than anything else strive to force God out of the life of men, so that men, satisfied with their material comfort, might not feel any need to turn to God in prayer, might not remember God, but might live as though He did not exist. Therefore, the whole order of today's life in the so-called ‘free’ countries, where there is no open bloody persecution against faith, where everyone has the right to believe as he wishes, is an even greater danger for the soul of a Christian (than open persecution), for it chains him entirely to the earth, compelling him to forget about heaven. The whole of contemporary ‘culture’, directed to purely earthly attainments and the frantic whirlpool of life bound up with it, keeps a man in a constant state of emptiness and distraction which gives no opportunity for one to go at least a little deeper into his soul, and so the spiritual life in him gradually dies out.” —Archbishop Averky (Taushev) of Syracuse, True Orthodoxy and the Contemporary World
“They have built a church career for themselves on a false but attractive premise: that the chief danger to the Church today is lack of strictness. No – the chief danger is something much deeper – the loss of the savor of Orthodoxy, a movement in which they themselves are participating, even in their ‘strictness.’… ‘Strictness’ will not save us if we don't have any more the feeling and taste of Orthodoxy.” —Fr. Seraphim Rose of Platina
“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” —Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“As the Lord taught, whatever is not crucified will not be resurrected, and whatever does not die will not live forever.” —Archbishop Zachariah of Essex
“If you die before you die, than when you die, you will not die.” —written on a cell wall, St. Paul's Monastery, Mt. Athos
“When you get bitter and annoyed, even if only in thought, you ruin the spiritual atmosphere. You stop the Holy Spirit from working and you allow the devil to increase evil. You should always pray, love and forgive, rejecting each and every bad thought within you.” —St. Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia
“The [guardian] angel will not retreat from us, unless we drive him away by our evil deeds. As the smoke drive bees away, and stench the doves, even so our stinking sin drives away from us the angel who protects our life.” —St. Basil the Great
“When you are praying alone, and your spirit is dejected, and you are wearied and oppressed by your loneliness, remember then, as always, that God the Trinity looks upon you with eyes brighter than the sun; also all the angels, your own Guardian Angel, and all the Saints of God.” —St. John of Kronstadt
“Sometimes men are tested by pleasure, sometimes by distress or by physical suffering. By means of His prescriptions the Physician of souls administers the remedy according to the cause of the passions lying hidden in the soul.” —St. Maximus the Confessor, Philokalia
“Not knowing God's intentions and judgments concerning us, in troubles, sorrows and illnesses we often, often complain to God that He punishes us beyond our strength and beyond our faults, but when the misfortunes and God's punishing visitation end, then even a little attention to ourselves convinces us that the sorrow was both useful and necessary for us, because it made us morally better and more attentive to ourselves, to our spiritual needs. If the heavenly Physician of souls had not given us the sharp and burning medicine of sorrow, then we would not have known the madness and destructiveness of sin, would not have turned away from it, would not have returned to the path of truth, duty and honor, would not have tasted the sweetness of virtue; we would not have known that in God, only in God is all our good: peace of soul, strength, light, glory, its life, true joy and ineffable sweetness. A true Christian is formed only under the cross: whoever does not bear the cross, that is, temptations, sorrows, deprivations, cannot be a true Christian, he is always a slave to sin, sinful habits and passions.” —St. John of Kronstadt
“One can be free, but in fact a slave. When he serves other men whose goals are evil – whether they are gluttony, or the lust for riches, or political power – such a person, even though he is free, is more a slave than any other man.” —St. John Chrysostom
“If you want, or rather intend, to take a splinter out of another person, then do not hack at it with a stick instead of a lancet, for you will only drive it in deeper.” —St. John Climacus
“O God, grant us a deeper sense of fellowship with all living things, our little brothers and sisters to whom in common with us you have given this earth as home. We recall with regret that in the past we have acted high-handedly and cruelly in exercising our domain over them. Thus, the voice of the earth which should have risen to you in song has turned into a groan of travail. May we realize that all these creatures also live for themselves and for you - not for us alone. They too love the goodness of life, as we do, and serve you better in their way than we do in ours. Amen.” —St. Basil the Great
“Tears are the eternal right of grief. And there is so much grief on earth that every joy is shrouded in sorrow. And no one causes people so much pain as we do to each other. Among animals there are predators and herbivores. Some pursue others. And so it is among people. Some offend, others suffer. What to choose? To offend others or to endure insults? Without a doubt, it is more profitable, easier, and more convenient to live without a heart and conscience. A person without a heart and conscience is not bound by anything. But for God, he is a stranger. He cannot be a Christian. A Christian must follow the path that Christ walked.” —Protopresbyter Pavel Adelgeim
“We follow the ways of wolves, the habits of tigers: or, rather we are worse than they. To them nature has assigned that they should be thus fed, while God has honoured us with rational speech and a sense of equity. And yet we are become worse than the wild beast.” —St. John Chrysostom