There is no worse sin than unbelief toward the gospel.

If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.

Monastic life thus became a living protest against the secularization of Christianity, against the cheapening of grace.

When a man really gives up trying to make something out of himself - a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called clerical somebody), a righteous or unrighteous man,...and throws himself into the arms of God...then he wakes with Christ in Gethsemane. That is faith, that is metanoia and it is thus that he becomes a man and Christian.

Jesus calls men, not to a new religion, but to life.

If we want to read and to pray the prayers of the Bible and especially the Psalms, therefore, we must not ask first what they have to do with us, but what they have to do with Jesus Christ...It does not depend, therefore, on whether the Psalms express adequately that which we feel at a given moment in our heart. If we are to pray aright, perhaps it is quite necessary that we pray contrary to our own heart. Not what we want to pray is important, but what God wants us to pray.

Love, in the sense of spontaneous, unreflective action, spells the death of the old man.