Please listen to me – you are not paying attention. I am talking to you about the Holy Scriptures, and you are looking at the lamps and the people lighting them. It is very frivolous to be more interested in what the lamplighters are doing… After all, I am lighting a lamp too – the lamp of God’s Word.
Quoted in Jay Adams, Be Careful How You Listen, Solid Ground Christian Publishers, 2007, p. 81.
By the cross we know the gravity of sin and the greatness of God’s love toward us.
Correct him, but not as a foe, nor as an adversary exacting a penalty, but as a physician providing medicines.
Higher than every painter, higher than every sculptor and than all artists do I regard him who is skilled in the art of forming the soul of children.
[We pray] not to inform God or instruct Him but to beseech Him closely, to be made intimate with Him, by continuance in supplication; to be humbled; to be reminded of our sins.
Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, 19:4.
Charity is, indeed, a great thing, and a gift of God, and when it is rightly ordered likens us to God Himself, as far as that is possible; for it is charity which makes the man.
Whether or not our prayer is heard depends not on the number of our words, but on the fervor of our souls.
No matter how just your words may be, you ruin everything when you speak with anger.
And as in the time of building the tower [of Babel] the one tongue was divided into many; so then [at Pentecost] the many tongues frequently met in one man, and the same person used to discourse both in the Persian, and the Roman, and the Indian, and many other tongues, the Spirit sounding within him: and the gift was called the gift of tongues because he could all at once speak divers languages.
Homilies on 1 Corinthians, 35:1.
Let us not so much labor to know where hell is – as how to escape it.