A collection of scriptural meditations from Saints and Fathers of the Church.

Charity, temperance, contemplation, and prayer please God; gluttony, licentiousness, and what multiplies them, please the flesh. Therefore they who are in the flesh cannot please God. And they that are Christ’s have crucified their flesh with the passions and concupiscences.

Keep the body properly slim so that you reduce the burden of the heart's warfare, with full benefit to yourself.

If you love the Sender, then also love the letter which is sent from Him to you. For the word of God is given by God to me, to you, and to everyone, so that everyone who desires to be saved may receive salvation through it.

Our flesh is an unfaithful friend.

Whoever is experienced in the spiritual interpretation of Scripture knows that the simplest passage is of a significance equal to that of the most abstruse passage, and that both are directed to the salvation of man.

Self-love -- that is, friendship for the body -- is the source of evil in the soul.

The Scriptures were not given merely that we might have them in books, but that we might engrave them on our hearts.

Reading the scriptures is a great safeguard against sin.

Having guarded ourselves against distractions and worries, let us turn our attention to our body on which mental vigilance is completely dependent. Human bodies differ widely from one another in strength and health. Some by their strength are like copper and iron; others are frail like grass. For this reason everyone should rule his body with great prudence, after exploring his physical powers. For a strong and healthy body, special fasts and vigils are suitable; they make it lighter, and give the mind a special wakefulness. A weak body should be strengthened by food and sleep according to one's physical needs, but on no account to satiety. Satiety is extremely harmful even for a weak body; it weakens it, and makes it susceptible to disease. Wise temperance of the stomach is a door to all the virtues. Restrain the stomach, and you will enter Paradise. But if you please and pamper your stomach, you will hurl yourself over the precipice of bodily impurity, into the fire of wrath and fury, you will coarsen and darken your mind, and in this way you will ruin your powers of attention and self-control, your sobriety and vigilance…

The Holy Fathers teach us how to become familiar with the Gospel, how to read it and how to understand it, what helps and what opposes its understanding. Therefore, at first you must devote more time to reading the Holy Fathers...

A humble and spiritually active man, when he reads the Holy Scripture, will refer everything to himself and not to another.

It is an insult to the intelligence to be subject to what lacks intelligence and to concern itself with shameful desires.

Ignorance of the scriptures is a precipice and a deep abyss.

You are accustomed to look upon your body as upon your own inalienable property, but that is quite wrong, because your body is God's edifice.

The garment of your soul must shine with the whiteness of simplicity.

Where there is simplicity, there are a hundred Angels, but where there is cleverness – there are none.

Break the bonds of your friendship for the body and give it only what is absolutely necessary.

Keep the body properly slim so that you reduce the burden of the heart's warfare, with full benefit to yourself.

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