On "Ecumenical dialogue"

...the cosmological dimension of the event of salvation and its ontological content is an area of little concern for the 'ecumenical dialogues' of our times.
Christos Yannaras

Name your favorite modern master of Biblical exegesis

...giving themselves up to the distorted meaning of allegory, have undertaken to give a majesty of their own invention to Scripture. It is to believe themselves wiser than the Holy Spirit, and to bring forth their own ideas under a pretext of exegesis. Let us hear Scripture as it has been written.
St. Basil the Great

The Ecumenical Throne

...has value and usefulness only when it sheds abroad upon all the earth the sweet and unsetting light of Orthodoxy. Lighthouses are useful if and as long as they light the way for those who travel on the sea to avoid the reefs. When their lights is extinguished, then they are not only useless but harmful, for they are themselves transformed into hazards.
Archimandrite Epiphanios (Theodoropoulos)

On Wisdom

...the Wisdom of God is Christ His Only-begotten Son: and he by his doctrine degraded the Wisdom of God into a female element...
St. Cyril of Jerusalem

I think you'll agree with me that there have been many of these "he's", especially in these modern times, i.e., the last 100-150 years.

Proper posture

Standing in God's temple, picture to yourself that you are in heaven itself, that you stand before God with the higher powers and do with them everything that they do. In picturing this to yourself, make a rule for yourself that under no circumstances will you leave church before the end of the service.
If you stand thus perfectly in order as said above, and from this standing you become very tired, or you become exhausted from some bodily illness or old age, then sit wherever there is a place in church, in order not to tempt your brother.
Examine yourself, whether it be not despondency or laziness that make you tired, whether it be not distraction of mind and bodily passions that make you lose your strength and manly courage. Reflecting thus, accuse yourself of impatience, of infirmity, of weakness, of laziness, and again be ashamed before God and His angels and men, and reflect in your conscience that he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved (Mk. 13:13).
If while standing in prayer you become completely unable to endure some natural necessity, or if some great affliction strikes you, accuse yourself likewise, just as written above. ...
And if you will thus reflect and accuse your own soul, and if you endure unto the end, you shall proceed from strength to strength and shall receive invisibly from God health of body and enlightenment of soul.
Elder Nazarius

You must know Christ!

You reason about salvation, yet you do not know what salvation is, why men are in need of it, and finally, you do not know Christ, the only means of our salvation. ... You must know Christ! You must realize that you do not know Him, that you deny Him if you acknowledge salvation possible without Him for any kind of good works! He who acknowledges salvation to be possible without Christ denies Christ and, perhaps without knowing it, falls into the grave sin of blasphemy. ... To be sure, you had a revelation from above on this subject, concerning what is contrary and what is not contrary to Divine mercy? -- No, it was sound reason that pointed it out. Ah, your sound reason! Still, where in your sound reason did you find out that it was possible to understand, with your own limited human mind, what is contrary and what is not contrary to the Divine mercy?
St. Ignatius (Brianchaninov)

My fear and trembling increase

...all the more at the thought that, while the strength and zeal of the leaders of the Church of Christ today are far from rivaling those of the Apostles, they must do battle with considerably stronger enemies and overcome considerably more powerful obstacles and difficulties in this service. The holy Apostles, after all, had to do with a fervent--even if falsely directed--striving toward truth, whereas we, in our time, must have to do with a hardened rejection of truth and even of the very idea of the Living God and His indispensability for the human heart. With all their dark sides, their insufficiencies and errors, the paganism and Judaism of antiquity were nonetheless an honest seeking of God, and honest desire to serve Him, a living and active exemplification of thirst for communion with Him. But the unbelief of today, every conceivable form of error and frenzy--both learned and illiterate, both anti-religious and anti-moral--and the whole public life of today: do they not express in men a complete unwillingness to know God, and unwillingness even to admit His existence, but on the contrary the desire to be completely rid of Him, to do without Him, to live solely by the accomplishments of the proud human mind and culture?
Metropolitan Joseph (Petrovykh) of Petrograd

The presence of Christ

Only by severely downgrading or eliminating altogether the importance of initiation into the life of the Church can one speak of Orthodox witness to the heterodox in the framework of ecumenical encounter. Ultimately, this translates into denying the existential reality of the Church itself (the life in Christ), and hence, by extension, the very diachronic presence of the Incarnate Christ Himself.
Fr. Peter Alban Heers

On Orthodox "unity" in America

Administrative union among Orthodox Churches is the least thing that is needed today. Those who are practicing true Orthodoxy are already one and united in spirit. What is actually needed is personal podvig in the full Orthodox Tradition from everyone who consciously calls himself Orthodox. No other kind of Orthodoxy has ever produced saints, in America or anywhere else.
Gleb (Fr. Herman) Podmoshensky

The essence of the question

It is not a question of one or another valuation of the conduct of Cardinal Humbert; it is not a question of any personal falling-out between Pope and Patriarch that could be easily healed by mutual Christian forgiveness; no -- the essence of the question lies in those deviations from Orthodoxy which have become rooted in the Roman Church during the course of centuries...
Metropolitan Philaret (Voznesensky)

Stalin's mistake

Stalinist culture considered that it represented the only escape from history and that the rest of the world had not yet entered the realm of pure mythology but remained historical. And it was here that Stalinist culture encountered its limit--it was swept away by the forces of history, because unlike Christianity it had failed to establish itself in the superhistorical; and when the extrahistorical competes with the historical, it inevitably loses, because it is fighting on alien ground.
Boris Groys

Christ is Risen

No one is so all-embracing as is the Lord Jesus. Who, of those so-called philanthropists of mankind, teachers, leaders or enlighteners ever attempted to perform any good for the dead?
St. Nikolai (Velimirovic)

The order of knowledge

...the lovers of God are not simpletons because they know God well enough that they are able to love Him. Of all human knowledge, this knowledge is more important and greater. To this must be added that the enemies of God cannot be more knowledgeable, even though they consider themselves as such, because their knowledge is unavoidably chaotic, for it does not have a source and does not have order. For the source and order of all knowledge is God.
St. Nikolai (Velimirovic)

Where is your goat's trail to be found?

Most men are surrendered unto Satan and run after wealth and other things of this life. But there are a few who believe with simplicity in the words of Christ. And again among these are found a few who go and live far away from the world, struggling and walking their whole life on the narrow and arduous goat's trail which our Lord showed us. They go to the desert and seek to find the hidden door of Paradise. These blessed men are not mistaken, but rather, know well where their ancient Fatherland is found.
From the life of St. Mark the Anchorite

Christ among us

Churches, shrines, chapels, ikons, candles, processions, priests, bells, monasteries, travelling preachers, every day's saints, fast seasons—everything is the repetition of the same idea, namely, that Christ is the ruler of life and we are His followers. Christ must be expressed everywhere, indoors and outdoors. Many Englishmen have remarked that the Bible is read very seldom in the home in Russia and Serbia. That is true. People read the Bible more in symbols, pictures and signs, in music and prayers, than in the Book, Our religion is not a book religion, not even a learned religion. It is a dramatic mystery. The Bible contains the words, but in this dramatic mystery there is something higher and deeper than words. Slav Christianity is something greater than the Bible. Looking at an ikon, a Russian mujik perceives the Bible incarnated in a saint's life-drama. Mystery of sin, mystery of atonement, mystery of heroic suffering, mystery of the daily presence of Christ among us in holy wine, in holy bread, in holy water, in holy word, in holy deed, in every sanctified substance, even in matter as in spirit, mystery of communion of sins and of virtues—all are recorded once in the Bible, and all are recorded and repeated also in our daily life—that is what we call our Slav Orthodoxy. We take the mystic outlines of the Bible and do not care about the details. In those mystic outlines we put our daily life, with its details of sins and sufferings.
St. Nikolaj (Velimirovic)

On "liturgical piety"

...it is difficult to reconcile oneself also to the term 'liturgical piety.' In the ordinary usage of words, piety is Christian faith, hope and love, independently of the forms of their expression. Such an understanding is instilled in us by the sacred Scriptures, which distinguish only authentic piety (piety is profitable unto all things - I Tim. 4:8) from false or empty piety (James 1:26, II Tim. 3:5). Piety is expressed in prayer, in Divine services, and the forms of its expression vary depending on circumstances: whether in church, at home, in prison, or in the catacombs, But we Orthodox scarcely need a special term like 'liturgical piety' or 'church piety,' as if one were pious in a different manner in church than at home, and as if there existed two kinds of religiousness: 'religiousness of faith' and 'religiousness of cult.' Both the language of the Holy Fathers and the language of theology have always done without such a concept. And therefore it is a new conception, foreign to us, of a special liturgical piety.

If we speak of worship as members of the Orthodox Church, there should be present to us that principle in the understanding of the history of our worship and its present status by which the Church Herself lives. ...if we maintain the Orthodox Symbol of Faith, if we confess that we stand on the right dogmatic path, we should not doubt that both the direction of church life and the structure of worship which was erected on the foundation of our Orthodox confession of faith, are faultless and true. We cannot acknowledge that our 'liturgical piety,' after a series of reformations, has gone far, far away from the spirit of Apostolic times.
Fr. Michael Pomazansky

...piety is, as it were, the groundwork and foundation of perfection.
St. Basil the Great

On Creation

I want creation to penetrate you with so much admiration that everywhere, wherever you may be, the least plant may bring to you the clear remembrance of the Creator.

...shall we, whom the Lord, the great worker of marvels, calls to the contemplation of His own works, tire of looking at them, or be slow to hear the words of the Holy Spirit? Shall we not rather stand around the vast and varied workshop of divine creation and, carried back in mind to the times of old, shall we not view all the order of creation?

...the sight of the moon, making us think of the rapid vicissitudes of human things, ought to teach us not to pride ourselves on the good things of this life, and not to glory in our power, not to be carried away by uncertain riches, to despise our flesh which is subject to change, and to take care of the soul, for its good is unmoved.

...the world was not conceived by chance and without reason, but for an useful end and for the great advantage of all beings, since it is really the school where reasonable souls exercise themselves, the training ground where they learn to know God; since by the sight of visible and sensible things the mind is led, as by a hand, to the contemplation of invisible things.

St. Basil the Great

The first place

Even today common enemies make peace among themselves when they find it necessary to attack and condemn the Lord. There are many who kill one another until you mention the Name of the Lord to them. As soon as they hear that Name, they gradually make peace among themselves for the sake of attacking that Holy Name. It is easier for the unjust to tolerate the unjust than it is for them to tolerate the just. It is easier for the unjust to come to an understanding and reconciliation with the unjust than with the just.

Even in some countries, the most quarrelsome parties seek reconciliation among themselves when it is deemed necessary to decide what place should be given to the Lord Jesus Christ in the State, either to render Him the first place, which is befitting to Him, or the last place? To these questions sworn enemies reconcile among themselves in order that our Lord will be given the last place only. So, also, it was with the quarreling parties of Pharisees and Saducees who were reconciled and entered into a partnership against Christ.

Why is it that the Most Pure and the Most Needed had to be awarded the last place? Because, according to their thinking, the first place would then be reserved for them. The same incentive was there between sworn enemies, the Pharisees and Saducees, when it was deemed necessary to seek to put Christ to death. The same incentive was the occasion that caused the reconciliation between Pilate and Herod when it was deemed necessary to judge that Christ had to be put to death.
St. Nikolaj (Velimirovic)

The ideal of repentance

...repentance from things better to things worse is a change impossible to us.
St. Polycarp of Smyrna

The terrible judgement

He who does not see God as the merciful Samaritan on earth will see Him as the Dreadful Judge in Heaven.
St. Nikolaj (Velimirovic)

"...I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." [Matthew 26:64]