Being aware of our natural poverty

Those who believe that they’ve achieved the limit of virtue will no longer seek the ultimate Cause Who provides all good things, because they have restricted the force of their desire to themselves alone and they lose the necessary requirement for their salvation. I mean God.

But those who are aware of their natural poverty don’t stop running in haste to Him Who can make up for our shortcomings.

Those who have understood that virtue is boundless never cease to run towards it, first so as not to miss the beginning and the end of virtue, that is God, by restricting the movement of their desire to themselves, and secondly in case, without realizing it, they believe that they’ve reached perfection and thus fall away from the true Being, Whom everyone who strives hastens to reach.

» Saint Maximos the Confessor