Best 11 quotes of Kallistos Ware on MyQuotes

Faith is not the supposition that something might be true, but the assurance that someone is there.

Fr. Amphilochios, the geronta or elder on the island of Patmos when I first stayed there, would have been in full agreement. Do you know, he said, that God gave us one more commandment, which is not recorded in Scripture? It is the commandment love the trees. Whoever does not love trees, so he believed, does not love God. When you plant a tree, he insisted, you plant hope, you plant peace, you plant love, and you will receive God's blessing.

The culture and educational system of the contemporary West are based almost exclusively upon the training of the reasoning brain and, to a lesser degree, of the aesthetic emotions. Most of us have forgotten that we are not only brain and will, senses and feelings; we are also spirit. Modern man has for the most part lost touch with the truest and highest aspect of himself; and the result of this inward alienation can be seen all too plainly in his restlessness, his lack of identity and his loss of hope.

The doors of Hell, insofar as they have locks, have locks on the inside.

The entire cosmos is one vast burning bush, permeated by the fire of the divine power and glory

The isolated individual is not a real person. A real person is one who lives in and for others. And the more personal relationships we form with others, the more we truly realize ourselves as persons. It has even been said that there can be no true person unless there are two, entering into communication with one another.

We are on a journey through the inward space of the heart, a journey not measured by the hours of our watch or the days of the calendar; for it is a journey out of time into eternity.

We become truly personal by loving God and by loving other humans... In its deepest sense, love is the life, the energy, of the Creator in us.

We see that it is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.

Correctly understood, repentance is not negative but positive. It means, not self-pity or remorse, but conversion, the re-centering of our whole life upon the Trinity. It is to look, not backward with regret, but forward with hope - not downwards at our own shortcomings, but upwards at God's love. It is to see, not what we have failed to be, but what by divine grace we can now become; and it is to act upon what we see. To repent is to open our eyes to the light. In this sense, repentance is not just a single act, an initial step, but a continuing state, an attitude of heart and will that needs to be ceaselessly renewed up to the end of life.

God was under no compulsion to create; but that does not signify that there was anything incidental or inconsequential about his act of creation. God is all that he does, and so his act of creating is not something that separates from himself. In God's heart and in his love, each one of us has always existed. From all eternity God saw each one of us as an idea or thought in his divine mind, and for each one from all eternity he has a special and distinctive plan. We have always existed for him; creation signifies that at a certain point in time we begin to exist also for ourselves.