Gregory of Nyssa > Quotes

“Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything. People kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees.”
― Saint Gregory Of Nyssa

“Concepts create idols; only wonder understands anything.”
― Gregory of Nyssa

“Concepts create idols; only wonder grasps anything.”
― Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses

“I got me slave-girls and slaves.' For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth as much as this human nature? What price did you put on rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God? How many staters did you get for selling that being shaped by God? God said, Let us make man in our own image and likeness. If he is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God, who is his buyer, tell me? Who is his seller? To God alone belongs this power; or, rather, not even to God himself. For his gracious gifts, it says, are irrevocable. God would not therefore reduce the human race to slavery, since he himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom. But if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his own power above God's?”
― Gregory of Nyssa

“For truly barren is profane education, which is always in labor but never gives birth. For what fruit worthy of such pangs does philosophy show for being so long in labor? Do not all who are full of wind and never come to term miscarry before they come to the light of the knowledge of God, although they could as well become men if they were not altogether hidden in the womb of barren wisdom?”
― Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses

“Be not anxious about what you have, but about what you are.”
― St. Gregory the Great

“and the creation, in the world and above the world, that once was at variance with itself, is knit together in friendship: and we ... are made to join in the angels' song, offering the worship of their praise.”
― Gregory of Nyssa

“The three most ancient opinions concerning God are Anarchia, Polyarchia, and Monarchia. The first two are the sport of the children of Hellas, and may they continue to be so. For Anarchy is a thing without order; and the Rule of Many is factious, and thus anarchical, and thus disorderly. For both these tend to the same thing, namely disorder; and this to dissolution, for disorder is the first step to dissolution. But Monarchy is what we hold in honor.”
― Gregory Nazianzus

“Truly barren is a secular education. It is always in labor, but never gives birth.”
― Gregory of Nyssa

“Christ is the artist, tenderly wiping away all the grime of sin that disfigures the human face and restoring God's image to its full beauty.”
― Gregory of Nyssa

“Moses’ vision of God began with light; afterwards God spoke to him in a cloud. But when Moses rose higher and became more perfect, he saw God in the darkness.”
― Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses

“Since with all my soul I behold the face of my beloved, therefore all the beauty of his form is seen in me.”
― Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Song of Songs

“Mine is to chew on the appropriate texts and make them delectable.”
― Gregory of Nyssa

“Anger is a perversion of courage, as lust is a perversion of love.”
― St. Gregory of Nyssa

“Just as at sea those who are carried away from the direction of the harbor bring themselves back on course by a clear sign, on seeing a tall beacon light or some mountain peak coming into view, so Scripture may guide those adrift on the sea of the life back into the harbor of the divine will.”
― Gregory of Nyssa

“Just as many questions might be started for debate among people sitting up at night as to the kind of thing that sunshine is, and then the simple appearing of it in all its beauty would render any verbal description superfluous, so every calculation that tries to arrive conjecturally at the future state will be reduced to nothingness by the object of our hopes, when it comes upon us.”
― Gregory of Nyssa, Collection of Writings

“We see the universal harmony in the wondrous sky and on the wondrous earth; how elements essentially opposed to each other are all woven together in an ineffable union to serve one common end, each contributing its particular force to maintain the whole; how the unmingling and mutually repellent do not fly apart from each other by virtue of their peculiarities, any more than they are destroyed, when compounded, by such contrariety; how those elements which are naturally buoyant move downwards, the heat of the sun, for instance, descending in the rays, while the bodies which possess weight are lifted by becoming rarefied in vapour, so that water contrary to its nature ascends, being conveyed through the air to the upper regions; how too that fire of the firmament so penetrates the earth that even its abysses feel the heat; how the moisture of the rain infused into the soil generates, one though it be by nature, myriads of differing germs, and animates in due proportion each subject of its influence; how very swiftly the polar sphere revolves, how the orbits within it move the contrary way, with all the eclipses, and conjunctions, and measured intervals of the planets. We see all this with the piercing eyes of mind, nor can we fail to be taught by means of such a spectacle that a Divine power, working with skill and method, is manifesting itself in this actual world, and, penetrating each portion, combines those portions with the whole and completes the whole by the portions, and encompasses the universe with a single all-controlling force, self-centred and self-contained, never ceasing from its motion, yet never altering the position which it holds.”
― Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection

“SOCIAL ANIMAL ALWAYS COME ACROSS SEVERAL COMPLICATIONS”
― Bishop of Nyssa Gregory, The Life of Saint Macrina

“So when did these last two originate? They transcend “whenness,” but if I must give a naive answer—when the Father did. When was that? There has not been a “when” when the Father has not been in existence. This, then, is true of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Put another question and I will answer it. Since when has the Son been begotten? Since as long as the Father has not been begotten.”
― Gregory of Nyssa, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius

“He was transfused throughout our nature, in order that our nature might by this transfusion of the Divine become itself divine, rescued as it was from death, and put beyond the reach of the caprice of the antagonist.”
― Gregory of Nyssa, The Great Catechism

“...we make the Holy Scriptures the rule and measure of every tenet; we necessarily fix our eyes upon that, and approve that alone which may be made to harmonize with the intention of those writings.”
― Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection

“Time had not altered the beauty of his countenance, nor darkened the brightness of his eyes. He continued on the same, preserved in an incorruptible beauty in the corruptibleness of nature.”
― Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses

“It is necessary, therefore, to regard the opinions the persons have taken up and to frame your argument in accordance with the error into which each has fallen, by advancing in each discussion certain principles and reasonable propositions, that thus, through what is agreed upon on both sides, the truth may conclusively be brought to light...Should [somone] say there is no God, then from the consideration of the skillful and wise economy of the Universe he will be brought to acknowledge that there is a certain overmastering power manifested through these channels.”
― Gregory of Nyssa, The Catechetical Oration of Gregory of Nyssa

“...while we confess the invariable character of the nature, we do not deny the difference in respect of cause, and that which is caused, by which alone we apprehend that one Person is distinguished from another — by our belief, that is, that one is the Cause, and another is of the Cause; and again in that which is of the Cause we recognize another distinction. For one is directly from the first Cause, and another by that which is directly from the first Cause; so that the attribute of being Only-begotten abides without doubt in the Son, and the interposition of the Son, while it guards His attribute of being Only-begotten, does not shut out the Spirit from His relation by way of nature to the Father.”
― Gregory of Nyssa, On Not Three Gods

“The belief in God rests on the art and wisdom displayed in the order of the world.”
― Gregory of Nyssa, The Catechetical Oration of Gregory of Nyssa

“it is not punishment chiefly and principally that the Deity, as Judge, afflicts sinners with; but He operates, as your argument has shown, only to get the good separated from the evil and to attract it into the communion of blessedness.”
― Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection

“As, when the sun shines above the earth, the shadow is spread over its lower part, because its spherical shape makes it impossible for it to be clasped all round at one and the same time by the rays, and necessarily, on whatever side the sun’s rays may fall on some particular point of the globe,”
― Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection

“As, when the sun shines above the earth, the shadow is spread over its lower part, because its spherical shape makes it impossible for it to be clasped all round at one and the same time by the rays, and necessarily, on whatever side the sun’s rays may fall on some particular point of the globe, if we follow a straight diameter, we shall find shadow upon the opposite point, and so, continuously, at the opposite end of the direct line of the rays shadow moves round that globe,”
― Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection

“In the same manner as the sea, those who are swept away from the course leading to the harbor correct their aim by a clear mark, looking for a lighthouse on high, or a certain mountain appearing. In the same manner Scripture by the example of Abraham and Sarah will direct us once more to the safe harbor of the divine will for those who have drifted out in the sea of life with a mind lacking a navigator.”
― Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses

“when evil shall have been some day annihilated in the long revolutions of the ages, nothing shall be left outside the world of goodness, but that even from those evil spirits shall rise in harmony the confession of Christ’s Lordship.”
― Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection