Evagrius Ponticus Quotes

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.

60. If you are a theologian, you truly pray. If you truly pray, you are a theologian.

5. Pray first for the gift of tears so that by means of sorrow you may soften your native rudeness. Then having confessed your sins to the Lord you will obtain pardon for them.

3. Prayer is a continual intercourse of the spirit with God. What state of soul then is required that the spirit might thus strain after its Master without wavering, living constantly with him without intermediary?

101. Just as bread is nourishment for the body and virtue for the soul, so is spiritual prayer nourishment for the intelligence.

83. The singing of Psalms quiets the passions and calms the intemperance of the body. Prayer, on the other hand, prepares the spirit to put its own powers into operation.

Once there was a meeting at The Cells about some matter and Abba Evagrius spoke. The priest said to him: “Abba Evagrius, we know that if you were in your homeland you would probably have been a bishop and the head of many [clergy]; but now you are living here as an alien.”
He was pricked in his conscience but not disturbed. Nodding his head, he said to him: “It is true, father; nevertheless, ‘I have spoken once; I will add nothing the second time’” (Job 40:5).

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

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

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.

37. First of all pray to be purified from your passions. Secondly, pray to be delivered from ignorance. Thirdly, pray to be freed from all temptation and abandonment.

70. You will not be able to pray purely if you are all involved with material affairs and agitated with unremitting concerns. For prayer is the rejection of concepts.

123. Happy is the monk who considers all men as god — after God.

125. A monk is a man who considers himself one with all men because he seems constantly to see himself in every man.

121. Happy is the man who thinks himself no better than dirt.