Category: Wisdom of the Saints

You will not see anyone who is truly striving after his spiritual advancement who is not given to spiritual reading.
– St Athanasius

Do you know that often a root has split a rock when allowed to remain in it? Give no place to the seed of evil, seeing that it will break up your faith.
– St Cyril of Jerusalem

All who ask receive, those who seek find, and to those who knock it shall be opened. Therefore, let us knock at the beautiful garden of Scripture. It is fragrant, sweet, and blooming with various sounds of spiritual and divinely inspired birds. They sing all around our ears, capture our hearts, comfort the mourners, pacify the angry, and fill us with everlasting joy.
– St John of Damascus.

Fasting is the soul of prayer, mercy is the lifeblood of fasting. So if you pray, fast’ if you fast, show mercy; if you want your petition to be heard, hear the petition of others. If you do not close your ear to others, you open God’s ear to yourself.
— St Peter Chrysologus

Apart from the cross, there is no other ladder by which we may get to heaven.
– St Rose of Lima

Books are the most wonderful friends in the world. When you meet them and pick them up, they are always ready to give you a few ideas. When you put them down, they never get mad; when you take them up again, they seem to enrich you all the more.
— Bl Fulton Sheen

Every fall, even if it be very grave and repeated, serves us always and only as a little step towards a higher perfection.
— St Maximilian Kolbe

The more we are afflicted in this world, the greater is our assurance in the next; the more we sorrow in the present, the greater will be our joy in the future.
— St Isidore

Faith means battles; if there are no contests, it is because there are none who desire to contend.
– St Ambrose of Milan

Wherever people are suffering, wherever they are humiliated by poverty or injustice, and where a mockery is made of their rights, make it your task to serve them.
– St John Paul the Great