…Behold. Great Lent has come. However, it is not the fasting of the body as much as the fasting of the tongue, of the mind, of the heart, and of the senses that should preoccupy us especially now during Great Lent. Let us purify ourselves with this kind of fasting internally, where spiritual snakes are lurking that poison the life of our soul and deaden our spiritual strength, leaving it unable to correct and transfigure our soul.

…God alone can give man the vision of his own sins. Only through God, can man see his sin and the fall that is the germ, the seed, the summation of all human transgressions.

by St. Gregory Palamas - Homily 58

from  Orthodoxy and the West: Hellenic Self-identity in the Modern Age

Excerpts from Letters of St. Basil 

Selected and translated by Constantine Cavarnos

By St. John of Kronstadt