Evagrius Ponticus Quotes

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.

153. When you give yourself to prayer, rise above every other joy — then you will find true prayer.

52. To separate the body from the soul is the privilege of only of the One who has joined them together. But to separate the soul from the body lies as well in the power of the man who pursues virtue. For our Fathers gave to the meditation of death and to the flight from the body a spiritual name: anachoresis [withdrawal].

114. Do not by any means strive to fashion some image or visualize some form at the time of prayer.

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.

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.

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

Do you desire, then, to embrace this life of solitude, and to seek out the blessings of stillness? If so, abandon the cares of the world, and the principalities and powers that lie behind them: free yourself from attachment to material things, from domination by passions and desires, so that as a stranger to all this you may attain true stillness.

65. If you long to pray, then avoid all that is opposed to prayer. Then when God draws near, he has only to go along with you.

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.

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.

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?

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