Basil of Caesarea: Quotes about God

“We thus become temples of God whenever earthly cares cease to interrupt the continuity of our memory of Him.”

Basil of Caesarea

vol. 1, p. 19
Letters

God , Memory

“Oh, God, enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with all living things, our brothers the animals to whom Thou gavest the earth in common with us. We remember with shame that in the past we have exercised the high dominion of man with ruthless cruelty so that the voice of the earth, which should have gone up to thee in song, has been a groan of travail.”

Basil of Caesarea

In circa A.D. 375. Included in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church (NPNF), edited by P. Schaff and Henry Wace (Edinburg: T. Clark, 1897), 2nd Series, Vol. 8. Quoted in Matthew Scully, [//books.google.it/books?id=SYY7AAAAQBAJ&pg=PT28 Dominion] (2002).

God , Exercises , Sense , Past

“When the mind is not dissipated upon extraneous things, nor diffused over the world about us through the senses, it withdraws within itself, and of its own accord ascends to the contemplation of God.”

Basil of Caesarea

vol. 1, p. 15
Letters

God , World , Sense

“Such too was Moses, who rose up in great wrath to oppose those who sinned against God, but endured with meekness of spirit all slanders against himself.”

Basil of Caesarea

vol. 1, p. 17
Letters

God

“When Heracles was quite a young man and was nearly of the age at which you yourselves are now, while he was deliberating which of the two roads he should take, the one leading through toils to virtue, or the easiest, two women approached him, and these were Virtue and Vice. Now at once, although they were silent, the difference between them was evident from their appearance. For the one had been decked out for beauty through the art of toiletry, and was overflowing with voluptuousness, and she was leading a whole swarm of pleasures in her train; now these things she displayed, and promising still more than these she tried to draw Heracles to her. But the other was withered and squalid, and had an intense look, and spoke quite differently; for she promised nothing dissolute or pleasant, but countless sweating toils and labours and dangers through every land and sea. But the prize to be won by these was to become a god, as the narrative of Prodicus expressed it; and it was this second woman that Heracles in the end followed.”

Basil of Caesarea

Source: On Greek Literature, p. 399

Women , God , Pleasure , Age