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Quotes

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

The way of humility is this: self-control, prayer, and thinking yourself inferior to all creatures.

When you humble yourself, everyone will seem saintly to you; when you are proud, everyone will seem bothersome and bad.

When it is needful that a person be humbled, then not only the Superior, the sisters, strangers and near ones, but even all creation, according to the words of St. Isaac the Syrian, will rise up against that person.

Take remarks without grumbling: be thankful when you are scorned, disregarded, ignored. But do not create humbling situations; they are provided in the course of the day as richly as you need. We notice the person who is for ever bowing and fussily servile, and perhaps say, How humble he is! But the truly humble person escapes notice: the world does not know him (I John 3:I); for the world he is mostly a 'zero.'

Our achievements must never loom large in our eyes; only our failures. But this must never lead us to despondency - the constant temptation - only to humility.

If the humbling of oneself before men is needful that one might be exalted before God, and temporal toil is the prerequisite of immortal life, what does it matter if some shake their heads and laugh at your self-abasement?

Be despised and rejected in your own eyes, and you will see the glory of God within yourself. For where humility blossoms, there God’s glory bursts forth.

Humility, even without works, can save a man.

What salt is for any food, humility is for every virtue. To acquire it, a man must always think of himself with contrition, self-belittlement and painful salf-judgment. But if we acquire it, it will make us sons of God.

Repentance raises the fallen, mourning knocks at the gate of Heaven, and holy humility opens it.

Behold, this is the true and the Christian humility. In this you will be able to achieve victory over every vice, by attributing to God rather than to yourself the fact that you have won.

As with the appearance of light, darkness retreats; so, at the fragrance of humility, all anger and bitterness vanishes.

For, just as it is good to recall ones sins, so it is also good to forget ones good deeds. Why is this? Because remembrance of our good deeds puffs us up with arrogance, whereas remembrance of our sins curbs and humbles our mind; the former makes us more sluggish, but the latter makes us more diligent. Indeed, those who do not think that they have anything good become more eager to acquire what is good, whereas those who reckon that they have stored up a great deal of merchandise, confident they have an abundance of this, do not display much zeal for obtaining more of it.

If therefore holy men, even when they do mighty things, think themselves worthless, what must be said of those who, without fruit of virtue, are yet swollen with pride? But any works, although they be good, are as nothing unless seasoned with humility. A great deed done boastfully, lowers rather than uplifts a man. He who would gather virtue without humility, carries dust in the wind; and where he seems to possess something, from the same is he blinded and made worse.

Acquire humility, which scorches the demons, obedience, which opens the door for the Son of God to enter a man, faith which saves a man, hope which makes him unashamed; and love which lets not a man fall away from God.

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

Love and humility form a holy pair; what the first builds, the second binds, thus preventing the building from falling asunder.

Do not approach the words of the mysteries contained in the divine Scriptures without prayer and beseeching God for help, but say: 'Lord, grant me to perceive the power in them!' Reckon prayer to be the key to the true understanding of the divine Scriptures.

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Archangel Michael Orthodox Church
5025 E. Mill Rd
Broadview Heights, Ohio 44147

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440-526-5192 (Phone)