Christ is born: glorify Him. Christ comes from heaven: go out to meet Him. Christ descends to earth: let us be raised on high.

It is more important that we should remember God than that we should breathe: indeed, if one may say so, we should do nothing else besides.

Let us become like Christ, since Christ became like us. He assumed the worse that He might give us the better; He became poor that we through His poverty might be rich.

Let us treasure up in our soul some of those things which are permanent..., not of those which will forsake us and be destroyed, and which only tickle our senses for a little while.

As far as we can reach, He Who Is, and God, are the special names of His Essence; and of these especially He Who Is, not only because when He spoke to Moses in the mount, and Moses asked what His Name was, this was what He called Himself, bidding him say to the people 'I Am has sent me' (Ex. 3:14), but also because we find that this Name is the more strictly appropriate.

These three things God requires of all the Baptized: right faith in the heart, truth on the tongue, temperance in the body.

Almost every sin is committed for the sake of sensual pleasure; and sensual pleasure is overcome by hardship and distress arising either voluntarily from repentance, or else involuntarily as a result of some salutary and providential reversal. 'For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged; but when we are judged, we are chastened by the Lord, so that we should not be condemned with the world.' (1 Cor. 11:31-32).