Top 15 Ignatius Bryanchaninov Quotes

Do you want to learn to love God? Separate yourself from any word, deed, thought and feeling forbidden by the Gospels.

If you think that you love God, but in your heart lives an unpleasant disposition toward even one person, you are grievously self-deluded.

He who has felt spiritual love will only despise carnal love, seeing it for the unsightly parody of love that it is.

Guard your conscience. Do not forget that you are the image and likeness of God, that you are obliged to present this image in purity and holiness to God himself. Woe to you if God will not recognize His image, will not find in it any similarity with Himself! He will utter the dreadful words: "I do not know you."

It is harder to fool the conscience than the mind. The conscience is capable of fighting long and hard against the mind deluded by its love of sin.

A desire fulfilled is a desire that will return with twice the demands.

The spiritual harvest requires a heart that is harrowed by repentance, softened by compunction, and irrigated by tears.

Being offended at the sins of others is a serious spiritual disease.

Let us guard our senses, not allowing them to be the channel for sin to enter into the cell of the soul.

The prince of this world tries to keep us in constant diversion, darkening us through the pleasures of the body!

Even in Eden, the mind tried to acquire knowledge without wisdom and attentiveness, and the knowledge proved to be lethal!

The light of Christ's teaching is heavy and intolerable for the sons of the world. They run from it into their dark, soundless pits—into distraction, into various earthly pastimes, into carnal pleasures. There, in their moral darkness, they live their earthly life with no spiritual, eternal goals.

The world pushes us off course because it serves vanity and death and tries to force everyone else to serve its fallen masters, sometimes with kind words, sometimes with outright persecution..

Our heart distracts us when it inclines to the fulfillment of its own fallen desires, when it leaves the path of God's will.

Our helmsman, the mind, sometimes loses his way and takes our whole life along with him down the wrong path.