Nathan Duffy

“The Holy Spirit has superbly described in the Psalter the war and struggle of an athlete of Christ with his own fall and with fallen spirits. The monks of early times learned the Psalter by heart, and they expressed in the words of the Spirit their prayers for their rescue from the pit of the passions, for deliverance from the jaws of the enemy, the devil.”
― Ignatius Brianchaninov, The Arena: Guidelines for Spiritual and Monastic Life

“Captured by the ideological animus, both socialist and liberal-democratic art abandoned the criterion of beauty - considered anachronistic and of dubious political value - and replaced it with the criterion of correctness.”
― Ryszard Legutko, Triumf człowieka pospolitego

“The habit of prayer, this incessant meditation on God’s Law, is not supposed to be something immediately useful. Trees do not bear fruit right away. They first must eat amply of the earth and drink deeply of its water. Such nourishment must serve first to build up the tree. The fruit will come later on, when it is supposed to. The life of Christian prayer and meditation knows nothing of instant holiness; it is all a matter of perseverance and patience. Some trees do not even begin to bear fruit for many years.”
― Patrick Henry Reardon, Christ in the Psalms

“We show right judgment and evince salutary intelligence when, in reading about the rules and experiences of the ancient Fathers and of their obedience—equally amazing both in the directors and in those who were being directed—we see at the present time a general decline of Christianity and recognize that we are unfit to inherit the legacy of the Fathers in its fullness and in all its abundance. And it is a great mystery of God, a great blessing for us, that it is left to us to feed on the crumbs that fall from the spiritual table of the Fathers.”
― Ignatius Brianchaninov, The Arena: Guidelines for Spiritual and Monastic Life