Sayings of the Holy Fathers:

Selected quotes From the Desert Fathers

"I once asked a very experienced father how humility is achieved through obedience. This was his answer: "A wisely obedient man, even if he is able to raise the dead, to have the gift of tears, to be free from conflict, will nevertheless judge that this happened through the prayer of his spiritual director; and so he remains a stranger and an alien to empty presumption. For how could he take pride in something that, by his reckoning, is due to the effort not of himself but of his director?"

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"An anchorite was living close to a monastery, and let a very austere life. Now it happened that some visitors came to the monastery and constrained him to eat outside the proper time. Afterwards the brothers said to him, 'Abba, were you not grieved by that?' He said to them, 'I am grieved only when I do my own will.' "

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A certain man asked the abbot Anthony saying, "What shall I keep that I may please God?" And the old man answering said, "These things that I bid thee, do thou keep. Wherever thou goest, have God ever before thine eyes; in what thou dost, hold by the example of the Holy Scripture: and in whatever place thou dost abide, be not swift to remove from thence. These things keep, and thou shalt be saved."