Evagrius Ponticus Quotes

6. The pure mind is an incense burner at the time of prayer when it touches upon no sensible object. According to virtue we will be one on the eighth day; according to knowledge, on the last day.

The main contemplations are five, under which all contemplation is comprised. And they say that the first is the contemplation of the adorable and holy Trinity, and that the second and the third are the contemplation of the incorporeal and the corporeal realities, and that the fourth and the fifth are the contemplation of the Judgment and of Providence.

6. Pray with tears and your request will find a hearing. Nothing so gratifies the Lord as supplication offered in the midst of tears.

122. Happy is the monk who views the welfare and progress of all men with as much joy as if it were his own.

113. By true prayer a monk becomes another angel, for he ardently longs to see the face of the Father in heaven.

2. If someone should want to behold the state of his mind, let him deprive himself of all mental representations, and then he shall behold himself resembling sapphire or the colour of heaven. It is impossible to accomplish this without impassibility, for he will need God to collaborate with him and breathe into him the connatural light.

There was a time when evilness did not exist, and there will be a time when it will no more exist, whereas there was no time when virtue did not exist, and there will be no time when it will not exist. For the germs of virtue are impossible to destroy.

64. The proof of apatheia is had when the spirit begins to see its own light, when it remains in a state of tranquility in the presence of the images it has during sleep and when it maintains its calm as it beholds the affairs of life.

119. Happy is the spirit that becomes free of all matter and is stripped of all at the time of prayer.

Just as it is possible to think of water both while thirsty and while not thirsty, so it is possible to think of gold with greed and without greed. The same applies to other things.

86. Knowledge! The great possession of man. It is a fellow-worker with prayer, acting to awaken the power of thought to contemplate the divine knowledge.

81. Agape is the progeny of apatheia. Apatheia is the very flower of ascesis. Ascesis consists in keeping the commandments. The custodian of those commandments is the fear of God which is in turn the offspring of true faith. Now faith is an interior an interior good, one which is to be found even in those who do not yet believe in God.

120. Happy is the spirit that attains to complete unconsciousness of all sensible experience at the time of prayer.

Blessed is the one who has reached the knowledge that cannot be abolished (beyond what cannot be, it cannot be gone).

26. Prayer is a state of the mind destructive of every earthly mental representation.