Orthodox Quotes

“We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft

“My 'morals' were sound, even a bit puritanic, but when a hidebound old deacon inveighed against dancing I rebelled. By the time of graduation I was still a 'believer' in orthodox religion, but had strong questions which were encouraged at Harvard. In Germany I became a freethinker and when I came to teach at an orthodox Methodist Negro school I was soon regarded with suspicion, especially when I refused to lead the students in public prayer. When I became head of a department at Atlanta, the engagement was held up because again I balked at leading in prayer. I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war. I think the greatest gift of the Soviet Union to modern civilization was the dethronement of the clergy and the refusal to let religion be taught in the public schools.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century

“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us.”
― St. Antony the Great

“Why is the truth, it would seem, revealed to some and not to others? Is there a special organ for receiving revelation from God? Yes, though usually we close it and do not let it open up: God’s revelation is given to something called a loving heart.”
― Seraphim Rose, God's Revelation to the Human Heart

“Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“When the great ship containing the hopes and aspirations of the world, when the great ship freighted with mankind goes down in the night of death, chaos and disaster, I am willing to go down with the ship. I will not be guilty of the ineffable meanness of paddling away in some orthodox canoe. I will go down with the ship, with those who love me, and with those whom I have loved. If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant. I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men. It has been a constant pain, a perpetual terror to every good man and woman and child. It has filled the good with horror and with fear; but it has had no effect upon the infamous and base. It has wrung the hearts of the tender; it has furrowed the cheeks of the good. This doctrine never should be preached again. What right have you, sir, Mr. clergyman, you, minister of the gospel, to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear? I do not believe this doctrine: neither do you. If you did, you could not sleep one moment. Any man who believes it, and has within his breast a decent, throbbing heart, will go insane. A man who believes that doctrine and does not go insane has the heart of a snake and the conscience of a hyena.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, The Liberty Of Man, Woman And Child

“The essence of religion remains love and kindness,
yet it has been the biggest cause of hatred and violence.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“When conversion takes place, the process of revelation occurs in a very simple way — a person is in need, he suffers, and then somehow the other world opens up. The more you are in suffering and difficulties and are 'desperate' for God, the more He is going to come to your aid, reveal Who He is and show you the way out...”
― Seraphim Rose, God's Revelation to the Human Heart

“We who are given the fullness of true Christianity are obliged to be working on ourselves, to be watching the signs of the times, and to be extremely joyful, as St. Paul is constantly saying: 'Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say: Rejoice!' (Phil. 4:4). We rejoice because we have something which all the death and corruption of this world cannot take away, that is, the eternal Kingdom of Jesus Christ.”
― Seraphim Rose

“Fidelity is a living, breathing entity. On wobbly footing, it can wander, becoming something different entirely.”
― Kay Goodstadt, Love and Death Over Tea

“I would urge us to be not too certain of our accustomed ways of looking at Genesis, and to open ourselves to the wisdom of the God-bearing men of the past who have devoted so much intellectual effort to understanding the text of Genesis as it was meant to be understood. These Holy Fathers are our key to understanding Genesis.”
― Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early Man: The Orthodox Christian Vision

“We must be careful not to judge - extremely careful! It is so terrible that it is beyond words! "Judge not, that ye be not judged." Have we kept this? Even if we have no virtue but we don't judge, Christ will save us and take us to Paradise.”
― Elizabeth P. Fitzgerald, Daily Quotes from "Words of the Heart" by Gerondissa Makrina Vassopoulou

“With my sins I am worse than a noisome cur but I began to beseech God for forgiveness, and He granted me not only forgiveness but also the Holy Spirit, and in the Holy Spirit I knew God.”
― Elizabeth P. Fitzgerald, A Year in the Holy Spirit with Saint Silouan the Athonite: - A Calendar of Daily Quotes

“When Sean and Daniel were two and four years old I opened their play kitchen fridge door and found a stack of stuffed bears.

"Why are the bears in here?"

They replied with authority, “We’ve been huntin’!”
― Elizabeth P. Fitzgerald, “Do birds know all their letters?”: Funny Book of Quotes

“The Holy Spirit is love, and He gives the soul strength to love her enemies. And he who does not love his enemies does not know God.”
― Elizabeth P. Fitzgerald, A Year in the Holy Spirit with Saint Silouan the Athonite: - A Calendar of Daily Quotes

“Fakhruddin ‘Iraqi produced one of the most exquisite commentaries on Ibn ‘Arabi’s doctrine of Love. This great poet-scholar had initially been associated with wondering qalandars, a group of outsiders who disregarded social norms and incurred the wrath of the orthodox community.”
― Laurence Galian, The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis

“You cannot serve both God and mammon; and if “mammon” represents, in earthly terms, our attachments to wealth and money, then in the spiritual life it represents our attachment to the compulsions of the passionate soul and body. If we wish to serve the man-befriending Lord and find our rest in Him, we must learn to serve Him alone and cast off the familiar masters that are our passions.”
― Matthew C. Steenberg, The Beginnings of a Life of Prayer

“Do not fill your mind with worldly noise without reason. Radios or televisions operating “in the background” prevent quietude by filling even empty moments with the distracting flow of sounds and voices. How shall we find quiet in our times of prayer, if we have so condition ourselves against it in every other moment?”
― Matthew C. Steenberg, The Beginnings of a Life of Prayer

“Accept what comes from God as His gift, and remain vigilant. Do not cling to even the good, past what is fitting. The weak mind can make idols even out of the good.”
― Matthew C. Steenberg

“Consider each temptation as an opportunity for purification, for strengthening your quiet resolve and spiritual fortitude. He who never falls in prayer is making no real attempt at growth.”
― Matthew C. Steenberg

“Let no temptation call you away from the life of prayer! Let no obstacle be for you a true menace! The Lord is victorious, mighty in battle, and our very Defender: who can do us harm?”
― Matthew C. Steenberg

“Our death is to be to this world in its sinful separation from God. We must die to our waywardness, to our self-will, to our false idols. We must die to a world that has taken death as its defining characteristic. Dying in this way, we open ourselves to life.”
― Matthew C. Steenberg

“The empty tomb transformed the cosmos. So will the prayer of the heart transform the person, the cosmos, even all creation.”
― Matthew C. Steenberg

“… any small step toward God reveals in a new way that we are not of this world.”
― Matthew C. Steenberg

“The Kingdom of God is not a Talmud, nor is it a mechanical collection of scriptural or patristic quotations outside our being and our lives. The Kingdom of God is within us, like a dynamic leaven which fundamentally changes man's whole life, his spirit and his body. What is required in patristic study, in order to remain faithful to the Fathers' spirit of freedom and worthy of their spiritual nobility and freshness, is to approach their holy texts with the fear in which we approach and venerate their holy relics and holy icons. This liturgical reverence will soon reveal to us that here is another inexpressible grace. The whole atmosphere is different. There are certain vital passages in the patristic texts which, we feel, demand of us, and work within us, an unaccustomed change.
These we must make part of our being and our lives, as truths and as standpoints, to leaven the whole. And at the same time we must put our whole self into studying the Fathers, waiting and marking time. This marriage, this baptism into patristic study brings what we need, which is not an additional load of patristic references and the memorizing of other people's opinions, but the acquisition of a new clear-sighted sense which enables man to see things differently and rightly. If we limit ourselves to learning passages by heart and classifying them mechanically — and teach men likewise — then we fall into a basic error which simply makes us fail to teach and make known the patristic way of life and philosophy.”
― Archimandrite Vasileios, Hymn of Entry: Liturgy and Life in the Orthodox Church

“This theological life and witness is a blessing which sweetens man's life. It is a food which is cut up and given to others; a drink poured out and offered in abundance for man to consume and quench his thirst. In this state one does not talk about life, one gives it. One feeds the hungry and gives drink to the thirsty. By contrast, scholastic theology and intellectual constructions do not resemble the Body of the Lord, the true food, nor His Blood, the true drink; rather they are like a stone one finds in one's food. This is how indigestible and inhumanly hard the mass of scholasticism seems to the taste and the mouth of one accustomed to the liturgy of the Church, and it is rejected as something foreign and unacceptable.”
― Archimandrite Vasileios, Hymn of Entry: Liturgy and Life in the Orthodox Church

“Fortunate is the man who is broken in pieces and offered to others, who is poured out and given to others to drink. When his time of trial comes, he will not be afraid. He will have nothing to fear. He will already have understood that, in the celebration of love, by grace man is broken and not divided, eaten and never consumed. By grace he has become Christ, and so his life gives food and drink to his brother. That is to say, he nourishes the other's very existence and makes it grow.”
― Archimandrite Vasileios, Hymn of Entry: Liturgy and Life in the Orthodox Church

“Go on, then, cross yourself. Arseny crossed himself. The storm resumed in the same breath: He cannot even cross himself properly! Could we have expected anything else from the Turkish infiltrators?”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, Evgenij Vodolazkin

“We are pilgrims who are going to the Holy Land.

His language seemed understandable, albeit strange, to the residents of Zara. The revelers' own speech was already garbled, too, so they regarded it with a fitting tolerance. Calmer already, they said to Arseny: Go on, then, cross yourself.

Arseny crossed himself.

The storm resumed in the same breath:

He cannot even cross himself properly! Could we have expected anything else from the Turkish infiltrators?

For a while, Ambrogio attempted to explain that Catholics and Orthodox cross themselves differently and demanded they be taken to the Venetian pretor, but nobody would listen to him any longer.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, Laurus

“When the religious tenets preach about the dependence of women on men as fathers, husbands, and sons for protection, single mothers are shattering this orthodox notion by being the wage-earners, breadwinners, and providers for their families, besides also taking up the caring and nurturing role.”
― Shalu Nigam, Single Mothers, Patriarchy and Citizenship in India: Rethinking Lone Motherhood through the Lens of Socio-legal and Policy Framework