God does not give heed to the ambitiousness of our prayers, because he is always ready to give to us his light, not a visible light but an intellectual and spiritual one; but we are not always ready to receive it when we turn aside and down to other things out of a desire for temporal things.
Hear, O God. Alas, for man's sin! So saith man, and Thou pitiest him; for Thou madest him, but sin is in him Thou madest not. Who remindeth me of the sins of my infancy? for in Thy sight none is pure from sin, not even the infant whose life is but a day upon the earth.
The one who is our very Life descended into our world, and bore our death, and slew it with the abundance of His own life. Thundering, He called out to us to return to Him in heaven.
You wish to be great, begin from the least. You are thinking to construct some mighty fabric in height; first think of the foundation of humility. And how great soever a mass of building one may wish and design to place above it, the greater the building is to be, the deeper does he dig his foundation.
Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale?... A gang is a group of men... in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention. If this villainy... acquires territory, establishes a base, captures cities and subdues people, it then openly arrogates to itself the title of kingdom.
The Gods occupy the loftiest regions, men the lowest, the demons the middle region...They have immortality of body, but passions of the mind in common with men.
You called and shouted and burst my deafness. You flashed, shone, and scattered my blindness. You breathed odors, and I drew in breath and panted for You. I tasted, and I hunger and thirst. You touched me, and I burned for Your peace.
It is not the being seen of men that is wrong, but doing these things for the purpose of being seen of men. The problem with the hypocrite is his motivation.
Within the Church, sins are forgiven in three ways: by baptism, by prayer, and by the greater humility of penance; yet God does not forgive sins except to the baptized.
To be under pressure is inescapable. Pressure takes place through all the world; war, siege, the worries of state. We all know men who grumble under these pressures and complain. They are cowards. They lack splendour. But there is another sort of man who is under the same pressure but does not complain, for it is the friction which polishes him. It is the pressure which refines and makes him noble
He who does little, but in a state to which God calls him, does more than he who labors much, but in a state which he has thoughtlessly chosen: a cripple limping in the right way is better than a racer out of it.