Quotes of the Day for October 24, 2025 – Thoughts on the spiritual danger of wrongly judging others

“…we often lightly pronounce sentence and form an idea about someone based upon… not even the knowledge of different facts of his biography, but much more often upon hearsay, conjecture, and our own opinions supported by nothing, yet influencing us so powerfully that we consider our opinions the sole and precise truth about one or another person. But this is not at all correct—not in 99 cases out of 100, but in all 100 cases. Therefore, if we speak about a negative, disagreeable, and suspicious relationship to a person, then we should definitely be speaking about our absence of love for him. And this absence, and even the very lack of desire to recognize it as a defect, says very much about our own selves. It says that we are far from the true Christian life.” (Priest Dimitry Shishkin)

“ “Everyone is bad and everything is bad!” This is the spirit of pride, a demonic spirit. This is a narrowing of our heart. It activates a mechanism from which people themselves suffer. All condemnation is the introduction of some kind of darkness into oneself. In the Gospel of John there are these words: He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. (John 3:18–19). In condemning, a person breaks the spiritual law of life in God and immediately receives a notice that he has sinned gravely. How many times this has happened—someone prays, asks God for mercy, forgiveness, the Lord gives it to him, and the person leaves the service renewed! But then he meets someone on the way back from Church, and condemnation begins: “This person’s this or that way, and he over there is off his rocker!” That’s all it takes. He loses everything that he gained! And many Holy Fathers say that the moment you look at someone wrongly, accept a foolish thought about them, grace leaves you instantly. Grace does not bear condemnation, which is utterly opposed to the gospel spirit.” (Archpriest George Breyev)

“Or are we in it [Church and life for God] for something else? Vanity, pride, power, judgment of others, even possessions of a religious type. I don’t know: our big, beautiful churches, our wonderful icons and so on. This could also be demonic, and it’s the most subtle demon-possession that there is. There’s a name for it in the tradition. In Greek, that name is planē; in Slavonic, it’s prelest. Sometimes even that’s written in English-language books, “prelest: p-r-e-l-e-s-t,” which means we think we’re with God; we think we’re holy, but in fact we’re in the hands of the devil; in fact we’re serving demons and not God, because we’re serving our own ego and our own power and our own will and not the will of God.” (Fr. Thomas Hopko)

“This disease of the soul first manifests itself as absolute confidence and trust in the rightness of our own point of view and judgement; it presupposes our personal superiority over others. And this twisted expression of self-confidence quickly degenerates into uncritical self-satisfaction and self-righteousness, into a kind of mindless self-admiration. It takes endless pleasure in the self, and in all that it does.” (Reverend Andrew Demotses)

“Who are we to judge others? There is one Judge and one final time of Judgment. When we condemn others, even if we think they deserve it, we act as if the “End Time” had already come and we are sitting on the throne of Christ. Thus, we forget our own sinfulness by our concentration on the faults of others.” (Fr. Basil)

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