“Do you want the prayer inside you? Do you want to find Christ? Well, you will find it here with the people we are working with. Do you hear them chatting idly, joking and laughing? Be careful as much as you can not to imitate them or to say to yourself “What kind of people are they?” And, to condemn them. You will be silent, do you work on your own and constantly say the Prayer. Then you will see what prayer you will find while working here in the mountain, while you’re killing yourself at work.”
Elder Haralambos
~Elder Haralambos Dionysiastis

“Many people honored the elder as a saint. If you were critical of him and accused him of being a sorcerer, he would answer them with his full self-assessment. “I’m not a saint or a sorcerer. I’m a sinful human being who tries to struggle. I look at myself as a speck of dust in the universe. I wish it were at least a clean speck!””
Elder Paisios
~Elder Paisios of Mt. Athos

“I however, feel that I am the most sinful person in the world. Of course, whatever I remembered I confessed, and I know God has forgiven me. But now I have the feeling that my spiritual sins are very many and I ask all those who have known me to pray for me…I always made the effort to pray, to read the hymns of the Church, the Holy Scriptures and the Lives of the Saints. May you do the same.”
St. Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia
~Final Letter in 1991

“When you see the contrary spirit approaching you to take hold of you do not be afraid; neither look at it nor attempt to expel it from within you. What do you do? The best thing is contempt. Open your arms to Christ like a little child that sees a wild beast approaching and is not afraid because his father is at his side: he throws himself into his father’s embrace. That is how to deal with every attack of the evil one and with every evil thought – with contempt.”
Elder Prophyrios
~Wounded by Love

“We must think about what Christ has prepared for us, in the good good Paradise, after the Second Coming. Now we go to the narthex of Paradise, but it cannot enter the mind of man what the good good Paradise is like. All light! All fragrance! Joy unspeakable! Blessedness! Nothing will grow old! Christ wants everything new in His Kingdom. Nothing odd. My mother died at 95 years old and I see her in Paradise at thirty years old.”
Elder Ephraim of Arizona
~2014 Interview

“‘Christian’ ecumenism relies on its support upon a vague but nonetheless real feeling of common Christianity which is shared by those who do not think or feel too deeply about the Church and its aims somehow to build a church comprising all such indifferent “Christians.” But common support can be dialogue with non-Christians rely on what possible ground can there be any kind of unity however loose between Christians and those who not merely do not know Christ but – as is the case with all the present-day representatives of non-Christian religions who are in contact with Christianity – decisively reject Christ?”
Fr. Seraphim Rose
~Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future