Robert > Robert's Quotes

“The bread which you hold back belongs to the hungry; the coat, which you guard in your locked storage-chests, belongs to the naked; the footwear mouldering in your closet belongs to those without shoes. The silver that you keep hidden in a safe place belongs to the one in need. Thus, however many are those whom you could have provided for, so many are those whom you wrong.”
― Saint Basil

“A good deed is never lost; he who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love.”
― St. Basil

“I want creation to penetrate you with so much admiration that everywhere, wherever you may be, the least plant may bring to you the clear remembrance of the Creator. If you see the grass of the fields, think of human nature, and remember the comparison of the wise Isaiah. “All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field.”
― Basil the Great, The Hexameron: With Extended Notes

“When I go into the house of one of these tasteless newly rich individuals, and see it bedecked with every imaginable hue, I know that this person possesses nothing more valuable than what is on display; such people decorate inanimate objects, but fail to beautify the soul.”
― Basil the Great, On Social Justice

“I know many who fast, pray, sigh, and demonstrate every manner of piety, so long as it costs them nothing, yet would not part with a penny to help those in distress.”
― Basil the Great, On Social Justice

“God always was, and always is, and always will be. Or rather, God always Is. For Was and Will be are fragments of our time, and of changeable nature, but He is Eternal Being. And this is the Name that He gives to Himself when giving the Oracle to Moses in the Mount. For in Himself He sums up and contains all Being, having neither beginning in the past nor end in the future; like some great Sea of Being, limitless and unbounded, transcending all conception of time and nature, only adumbrated [intimated] by the mind, and that very dimly and scantily.”
― St. Gregory the Theologian

“For nothing is so pleasant to men as talking of other people's business, especially under the influence of affection or hatred, which often almost entirely blinds us to the truth.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, The Orations

“No sooner do I conceive of the one than I am illumined by the splendor of the three;
no sooner do I distinguish them than I am carried back to the one.

When I think of anyone of the three I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me.
I cannot grasp the greatness of that one so as to attribute a greater greatness to the rest.

When I contemplate the three together, I see but one torch, and cannot divide or measure out the undivided light.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus

“But why would anyone on a joyous occasion rake over past unpleasantness and dwell on painful events horrible to experience and repellent to recall? Silence is mightier than words. It clothes the wreckage that befalls us in the deep folds of forgetfulness unless someone stirs up the painful memories for the sole purpose of edifying us by example and, as with illnesses, of helping us avoid the causes that led us to them.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus

“What was Adam? Something molded by God.31 What was Eve? A portion of that molded creation.32 Seth? He was the offspring of the pair.33 Are they not, in your view, the same thing—the molded creation, the portion, and the offspring? Yes, of course they are. Were they consubstantial? Yes, of course they were. It is agreed, then, that things with a different individual being can be of the same substance.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“Attack the silence of Pythagoras, and the Orphic beans, and that preposterous brag, "Himself has spoken." Attack the "Ideas" of Plato, and the transbodiment and circulation of our souls, and the reminiscences, and the unlovely loves of lovely bodies, though directed to the beloved's soul. Attack the atheism of Epicurus, and his atoms, and his doctrine of pleasure, unworthy of a philosopher; or Aristotle's petty Providence, and his artificial system, and his discourses about the mortality of the soul, and the exclusively human focus his teaching. Attack the haughtiness of the Stoa, or the greed and vulgarity of the Cynic. Attack for me the emptiness that is full of absurdities - all that stuff about the gods and the sacrifices and the idols and the demons, whether beneficent or malignant, and all the tricks that people play with divination, the calling up of gods or of souls, and the power of stars.”
― Gregory of Nazianzus, The Five Theological Orations of Gregory of Nazianzus

“Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything. People kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees.”
― Saint Gregory Of Nyssa

“I got me slave-girls and slaves.' For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth as much as this human nature? What price did you put on rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God? How many staters did you get for selling that being shaped by God? God said, Let us make man in our own image and likeness. If he is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God, who is his buyer, tell me? Who is his seller? To God alone belongs this power; or, rather, not even to God himself. For his gracious gifts, it says, are irrevocable. God would not therefore reduce the human race to slavery, since he himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom. But if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his own power above God's?”
― Gregory of Nyssa

“Just as many questions might be started for debate among people sitting up at night as to the kind of thing that sunshine is, and then the simple appearing of it in all its beauty would render any verbal description superfluous, so every calculation that tries to arrive conjecturally at the future state will be reduced to nothingness by the object of our hopes, when it comes upon us.”
― Gregory of Nyssa, Collection of Writings

“We see the universal harmony in the wondrous sky and on the wondrous earth; how elements essentially opposed to each other are all woven together in an ineffable union to serve one common end, each contributing its particular force to maintain the whole; how the unmingling and mutually repellent do not fly apart from each other by virtue of their peculiarities, any more than they are destroyed, when compounded, by such contrariety; how those elements which are naturally buoyant move downwards, the heat of the sun, for instance, descending in the rays, while the bodies which possess weight are lifted by becoming rarefied in vapour, so that water contrary to its nature ascends, being conveyed through the air to the upper regions; how too that fire of the firmament so penetrates the earth that even its abysses feel the heat; how the moisture of the rain infused into the soil generates, one though it be by nature, myriads of differing germs, and animates in due proportion each subject of its influence; how very swiftly the polar sphere revolves, how the orbits within it move the contrary way, with all the eclipses, and conjunctions, and measured intervals of the planets. We see all this with the piercing eyes of mind, nor can we fail to be taught by means of such a spectacle that a Divine power, working with skill and method, is manifesting itself in this actual world, and, penetrating each portion, combines those portions with the whole and completes the whole by the portions, and encompasses the universe with a single all-controlling force, self-centred and self-contained, never ceasing from its motion, yet never altering the position which it holds.”
― Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection

“He who busies himself with the sins of others, or judges his brother on suspicion, has not yet even begun to repent or to examine himself so as to discover his own sins...”
― St. Maximos the Confessor

“The demons that wage war on us through our shortcomings in virtue are those that teach unchastity, drunkenness, avarice and envy. Those that wage war on us through our excessive zeal for virtue teach conceit, self-esteem and pride; they secretly pervert what is commendable into what is reprehensible.”
― St. Maximos the Confessor

“He who is not attracted by worldly things cherishes stillness. He who loves nothing merely human loves all men. And he who takes no offence at anyone either on account of their faults, or on account of his own suspicious thoughts, has knowledge of God and of things divine.”
― St Maximos the Confessor

“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.”
― John Chrysostom

“Helping a person in need is good in itself. But the degree of goodness is hugely affected by the attitude with which it is done. If you show resentment because you are helping the person out of a reluctant sense of duty, then the person may recieve your help but may feel awkward and embarrassed. This is because he will feel beholden to you. If,on the other hand, you help the person in a spirit of joy, then the help will be received joyfully. The person will feel neither demeaned nor humiliated by your help, but rather will feel glad to have caused you pleasure by receiving your help. And joy is the appropriate attitude with which to help others because acts of generosity are a source of blessing to the giver as well as the receiver.”
― St. John Chrysostom

“He who is not angry, whereas he has cause to be, sins. For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices, it fosters negligence, and incites not only the wicked but the good to do wrong.”
― John Chrysostom

“For who that possesses reason and beholds such manifest differences among beings-both the oppositions of hidden forces and the compensating kinetic impulses, and again stability that compensates in another way; the ceaseless resolutions arising out of contrary affections and the unconfused harmony arising out of irreconcilable strife; the cohesion of things that are distinct and the continuing distinction of those that are united, whether they be minds, souls, or bodies; the harmony among so many, their established positions and relations; the conformity of their states and ranks to their essence, the indissolubility of their connection-who that attends to all these points would not form a conception of the One who has so well established each thing in itself and wondrously harmonized each with the others, so as to come to know God from his image that which he has caused?”
― Gregory Palamas, Gregory Palamas: The Triads

“There is no death: there are only two worlds, or rather one, yet for the time being it remains, for us, divided.”
― Sergius Bulgakov, Spiritual Diary

“We live in an old chaos of the sun.”
― Wallace Stevens

“Propaganda is only successful when it is in harmony with something in the patient: his desire for an immortal soul, for health, for the greatness of his nation, or what not. Where there is no such fundamental reason for acquiescence, the assertions of authority are viewed with cynical scepticism. One of the advantages of democracy, from the governmental point of view, is that it makes the average citizen easier to deceive, since he regards the government as his government.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“The employee differs from a slave in the fact that he is free to change his job if he can, and in his right to spend his non-working hours as he pleases. The analogy that I wish to bring out is in relation to government. Tyrannies, oligarchies, and democracies differed in their relations to free men; in relation to slaves, they were all alike. Similarly in a capitalist industrial enterprise the power may be divided among investors monarchically, oligarchically, or democratically, but employees, unless they are investors, have no share in it whatever, and are thought to have as little claim as slaves were thought to have in antiquity.”
― Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis

“That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic including A Free Man's Worship

“A truly scientific philosophy will be more humble, more piecemeal, more arduous, offering less glitter of outward mirage to flatter fallacious hopes, but more indifferent to fate, and more capable of accepting the world without the tyrannous imposition of our human and temporary demands.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher; and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately, it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic

“When we look at the sun we wish to know [135]something about the sun itself, which is ninety-three million miles away; but what we see is dependent upon our eyes, and it is difficult to suppose that our eyes can affect what happens at a distance of ninety-three million miles. Physics tells us that certain electromagnetic waves start from the sun, and reach our eyes after about eight minutes. They there produce disturbances in the rods and cones, thence in the optic nerve, thence in the brain. At the end of this purely physical series, by some odd miracle, comes the experience which we call "seeing the sun," and it is such experiences which form the whole and sole reason for our belief in the optic nerve, the rods and cones, the ninety-three million miles, the electromagnetic waves, and the sun itself. It is this curious oppositeness of direction between the order of causation as affirmed by physics, and the order of evidence as revealed by theory of knowledge, that causes the most serious perplexities in regard to the nature of physical reality. Anything that invalidates our seeing, as a source of knowledge concerning physical reality, invalidates also the whole of physics and physiology. And yet, starting from a common-sense acceptance of our seeing, physics has been led step by step to the construction of the causal chain in which our seeing is the last link, and the immediate object which we see cannot be regarded as that initial cause which we believe to be ninety-three million miles away, and which we are inclined to regard as the "real" sun.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays: Enriched edition. Exploring Mysticism and Logic: A Fresh Perspective on Truth and Knowledge