Clearly, it is a happier lot to be the slave of a man than of a lust:.
The deformity of Christ forms you. If he had not willed to be deformed, you would not have recovered the form which you had lost. Therefore he was deformed when he hung on the cross. But his deformity is our comeliness. In this life, therefore, let us hold fast to the deformed Christ.
A wholesome fear would be a fit guardian for the citizens.
It is the part of a wise man not to seek for evil, but to endure it.
Love the sinner and hate the sin.
So the will’s desire for death is not a desire for nonexistence, but a desire for peace. When someone wrongly believes that he will not exist, he desires by nature to be at peace; that is, he desire to exist in a higher degree.
Thus the quarrel that arose between Remus and Romulus demonstrated the division of the earthly city against itself; while the conflict between Cain and Abel displayed the hostility between the two cities themselves, the City of God and the city of men. Thus.
Day after day I postponed living in you, but I never put off the death which I died each day in myself. I longed for a life of happiness but I was frightened to approach it in its own domain; and yet, while I fled from it, I still searched for it.
That joy is to know You as You are. This is the happy life, to rejoice in You, of You, and for You. This is the happy life, and there is no other.
This is pride when the soul abandons Him to Whom it ought to cleave as its end and becomes a kind of end to itself. This happens when it becomes its own satisfaction.
Between temporal and eternal things there is this difference: a temporal thing is loved more before we have it, and it begins to grow worthless when we gain it, for it does not satisfy the soul, whose true and certain rest is eternity; but the eternal is more ardently loved when it is acquired than when it is merely desired.
In this manner the Church proceeds on its pilgrim way in this world, in these evil days. Its troubled course began not merely in the time of the bodily presence of Christ and the time of his apostles; it started with Abel himself, the first righteous man slain by an ungodly brother; and the pilgrimage goes on from that time right up to the end of history, with the persecutions of the world on one side, and on the other the consolations of God.
To confess, then, is to praise and glorify God; it is an exercise in self-knowledge and true humility in the atmosphere of grace and reconciliation.
We have wandered far from God; and if we wish to return to our Father’s home, this world must be used, not enjoyed, that so the invisible things of God may be clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, – that is, that by means of what is material and temporary we may lay hold upon that which is spiritual and eternal.
Where shall I go, beyond the bounds of heaven and earth, that God may come to me, since He has said: Heaven and earth do I fill.
I was inflamed to love, and seek, and obtain, and hold, and embrace, not some sect, but wisdom itself-whatever it was.
Vanity and truth are directly contrary to one another.
Do not feel surprise at being schooled amid toil: you are being schooled for a wondrous destiny.
However alarming, however distressing self-knowledge may be, better that than the tremendous evils of self-ignorance.“ – Caird.
For it is one thing to fall into sin, another to form the habit of sinning.