Jacob V.

“To give free rein to the senses is to shackle the soul, to shackle the senses is to liberate it.”
― Theoleptos

“The fight against Nature is hopeless and yet — it will be fought out to the bitter end.”
― Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life

“We should look on man with wonder, conscious that his intellect, being infinite, is the image of the invisible God; and that even if it is for a time limited by the body, as St Basil says, it can embrace all form, just as God's providence embraces the whole universe. For the intellect has the ability to transform itself into everything, and is dyed with the form of the object it apprehends. But when it is taken up into God, who is formless and imageless, it becomes formless and imageless itself. Then we should marvel at how the intellect can preserve any thought or idea, and how an earlier thought need not be modified by later thoughts, or a later thought injured by earlier ones. On the contrary, the mind like a treasure-house tirelessly stores all thoughts. And these thoughts, whether new or long held in store, the intellect when it wishes can express in language; yet although words are always coming from it, it is never exhausted.”
― St. Peter of Damascus

“The greater one's purity, the more clearly one sees how much one sins; and the more one sins, the more benighted one is, even though one may appear to be pure. Again, the more knowledge one has, the more one thinks oneself ignorant; and the more one is ignorant of one's ignorance and of the shortcomings in one's spiritual knowledge, the more one thinks one knows. The more the spiritual contestant endures afflictions, the more he will defeat the enemy; and, lastly, the more one tries for one day to do something good, the more one is a debtor all the days of one's life, as St Mark has said; for even if the ability and desire to do good are one's own the grace to do it comes from God. It is only because of this grace that we are able to do anything good; when we do it, then, what have we to boast about?”
― St. Peter of Damascus