204 Quotes About Orthodoxy

The criterion of my spiritual health is this: what is the state of relations between me and those with whom I live? No other criterion is higher. Family life is the measuring stick of Christian progress for those who live in the world.

When we speak with our children, we should be really listening to them. Sometimes Christian adults have only half an ear for children, unless perhaps they speak about God....Even when we are busy, we have to feel whether a small child’s question is serious enough to make us interrupt what we are doing, because the opportunity to answer that question may not occur again. A child has to reach a certain maturity before serious answers can be postponed.

Our children should feel that they can peacefully say anything: questions, doubts, criticism, points of view. They should feel that we are genuine interested in what they do and think. We should not deprive them of privacy, but all our words and conduct should encourage an open relationship. One cannot overestimate the value of such relationships.

Our children should feel that they can peacefully say anything: questions, doubts, criticism, points of view. They should feel that we are genuinely interested in what they do and think. We should not deprive them of privacy, but all our words and conduct should encourage an open relationship. One cannot overestimate the value of such relationships.

One could imagine a parent saying, after prayer and reflection: “Dance, listen, go; but keep love for Christ alive in your heart.” Often the desire to do what their contemporaries are doing is a phase that children must get out of their system, similar to a childhood illness like chickenpox.

Something which a teenager does cannot be judged in the same way as something a committed adult Christian does—everything depends on the direction someone is taking within his heart.

Example speaks louder than words. We have seen children coming regularly to our monastery while they were growing up. We know that many kept Christian ideals of purity because they were inspired, simply by the people they saw, to resist the permissive tendency surrounding them in most other environments they frequented.

Whenever a president visits, my father [Nasser] farewells them at the guests' rooms door; but with Kyrillos, he farewells him at the car door and remains there standing until the car leaves.

Kyrillos on one occasion casually approached the lions. Both he and the lions gently accepted the presence of the other. "Why be astonished?" the emperor is remembered as commenting to shocked onlookers, "He is a holy man.