“If you wish, the Lives of the Saints are a sort of Orthodox Encyclopedia. In them can be found everything which is necessary for the Soul which hungers and thirsts for Eternal righteousness and Eternal truth in this life, and which hungers and thirsts for Divine immortality and Eternal Life. If faith is what you need, there you will find it in abundance: and you will feed your Soul with food which will never make it hungry. If you need love, truth, righteousness, hope, meekness, humility, repentance, Prayer, or whatever virtue or podvig, in them, the Lives of the Saints, you will find a countless number of Holy teachers for every podvig and will obtain Grace-filled help for every virtue.”
“If you are suffering for your faith in Christ, the Lives of the Saints will console you and encourage you and make you bold and give you wings, and your torments will be changed into joy.”
“Let us return to the Christ-bearing Ascetics and to the Holy Fathers.”
“There is no passion, no sin for which the Lives of the Saints do not show how the passion or sin in question in conquered, mortified, and uprooted”.
“The most obvious proof of this is the fact that God the Word has become Incarnate, has become man (John 1:14). By His Incarnation, matter has been magnified with Divine Glory and has entered into the Grace – and virtue – bestowing, ascetic aim of deification, or union with Christ. God has become flesh, has become human, so that the entire man, the entire body, might be filled with God and with His miracle-working forces and powers. In the God-Man, the Lord Christ, and His Body, all matter has been set on a path toward Christ – the path of Deification, transfiguration, Sanctification, resurrection, and ascent to an Eternal Glory surpassing that of the Cherubim. And all of this takes place and will continue to take place through the Divine and human Body of the Church, which is truly the God-Man Christ in the total fullness of His Divine and Human Person, the fullness “that fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:23). Through its Divine and human existence in the Church, the human body, as matter, as substance, is Sanctified by the Holy Spirit and in this way participates in the life of the Trinity. Matter thus attains its transcendent, Divine meaning and goal, its Eternal blessedness and its immortal joy in the God-Man.”