The deadly wound consists of every sin that is not repented and confessed, and of falling into despair. This depends on our choice and will. If we do not yield ourselves to the pit of carelessness and despair the devils cannot prevail over us. Even when we have been wounded, if we so wish we may through fervent penitence become more courageous and skillful fighters.
When the door of steam baths is continually left open, the heat inside rapidly escapes through it; likewise the soul in its desire to say many things, dissipates the remembrance of God through the door of speech, even though everything it says may be good. Ideas of value always shun verbosity, being foreign to confusion and fantasy. Timely silence, then, is precious, for it is nothing less than the mother of the wisest thoughts.
Join to every breath a sober invocation of the name of Jesus and the thought of death with humility. Both these practices bring great profit to the soul.
Our prayer reflects our attitude towards God. He who is careless of salvation has a different attitude toward God from him who has abandoned sin and is zealous for virtue but has not yet entered within himself and works for the Lord only outwardly. Finally, he who has entered within and carries the Lord within himself, standing before Him, has yet another attitude. The first man is negligent in prayer, just as he is negligent in life, and he prays in church and at home merely according to the established custom, without attention or feeling. The second man reads many prayers and goes often to church, trying at the same time to keep his attention from wandering and to experience feelings in accordance with the prayers which are read, although he is seldom successful. The third man, wholly concentrated within, stands with his mind before God, and prays to Him in his heart without distraction, without long verbal prayers, even when standing for a long time at prayer in his home or in church.... Every prayer must come from the heart and any other prayer is no prayer at all. Prayer-book prayers, your own prayers and very short prayers, all must issue forth from the heart to God, seen before you.
Do not pray for the fulfillment of your wishes, for they may not accord with the will of God. But pray as you have been taught, saying: 'Thy will be done in me' (Luke 22.42). Always entreat Him in this way, that His will be done. For He desires what is good and profitable for you, whereas you do not always ask for this. Often when I have prayed, I have asked for what I thought was good, and persisted in my petition, stupidly importuning the will of God, and not leaving it to Him to arrange things as He knows is best for me, But when I have obtained what I asked for, I have been very sorry that I did not ask for the will of God to be done, because the thing turned out not to be as I thought.
The origin of the Christian life is in arousal by grace. A person who has heeded this arousal is not then deprived of guidance by grace and communion with it at all times, as it persists through proper attention to it.
God seeks nothing else from us men except that we do not sin; this alone. But this is not a work of law; it is rather a careful guarding of the image and dignity from above. In these things, affirmed in our nature and bearing the radiant garment of the Spirit, we shall abide in God and He in us. We shall be called good, and sons of God by adoption, marked in the light of our knowledge of God.
Never allow yourself boldly to judge your neighbor; judge and condemn no one, ... rather have compassion and pity for him, but let his example be a lesson in humility to you; realizing that you too are extremely weak and as easily moved to sin as dust on the road, say to yourself: 'He fell today, but tomorrow I shall fall.'
Those who meditate unceasingly upon the holy and glorious name [of Jesus] in the depths of their heart can sometimes see the radiance of their own spirit-intelligence. For when the mind is profoundly concentrated on this invocation, we feel experientially how it starts burning off all the layers of dirt that normally suffocates the soul.
Set as a goal the kindling of the fire of the spirit, so that the spiritual fire will burn in your heart and, gathering up all your strength into one, will begin to build your inner man and finally burn up the tares of your sins and passions.
After a man has decided to abandon his wrong ways and actually does abandon them, the first task of the enemy is to clear a space for an unhampered field of action against him. He succeeds in this by suggesting to a man, who has entered the right path, that he should act on his own, and not go for advice and guidance to the teachers of righteous life, who are always attached to the Church. A man who follows their guidance and verifies all his actions, both inner and outer, by the good judgement of his teachers - priests in their parishes in the case of laymen, experienced startzi in monasteries - cannot be approached by the enemy. Whatever he may suggest, the experienced eye will at once see where he is driving and will warn his pupil. In this way all his wiles are defeated. But if a man turns away from his teachers, the enemy will at once confuse him and lead him astray ... There are many possibilities, which do not look evil; and those he suggests... the novice, who, feeling thus free and unhampered, begins to imagine that this good state is the fruit of his own efforts, and so rests in them.
Faith is the sincere confession that God, Who is worshipped in the Trinity, Who created all things and provides for all, saves us who are fallen, through the power of the death on the Cross of the incarnate Son of God, by the grace of the Most Holy Spirit in His Holy Church. The beginnings of renewal, which are established in this life, will appear in all their glory in the future age, in a way that the mind cannot comprehend nor the tongue express.
