A monastery is an earthly heaven. — John Climacus

"I will not be silent about something which it is not right to leave in silence lest I should inhumanly keep to myself what ought to be made known."

"Even if glory is God-given, yet it is excellent to divert it from oneself with the shield of humility."

"A shrewd hesychast requires no words. He is enlightened by deeds rather than by words.The start of stillness is the rejection of all noisiness as something that will trouble the depths of the soul. The final point is when one has no longer a fear of noisy disturbance, when one is immune to it. He who when he goes out does not go out in his intellect is gentle and wholly a house of love, rarely moyed to speech and never to anger. The opposite to all this is manifest.Strange as it may seem, the hesychast is a man who fights to keep his incorporeal self shut up in the house of the body."

"Obedience is the tomb of the will and the resurrection of humility."

"The beginning of prayer is the expulsion of distractions from the very start by a single thought; the middle stage is the concentration on what is being said or thought; its conclusion is rapture in the Lord.Prayer brings one sort of joy to those living in community, and another to those praying in stillness. Elation is sometimes characteristic of the former, but humility is always to be found in the latter."

"Constantly wrestle with your thought, and whenever it wanders call it back to you"