Abbot Palladius said: “The soul that wishes to live according to the will of Christ
should either learn faithfully what it does not yet know, or teach openly what it
does know. But if, when it can, it desires to do neither of these things, it is
afflicted with madness. For the first step away from God is a distaste for learning,
and lack of appetite for those things for which the soul hungers when it seeks
God.”
Thomas Merton, trans. The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings form the Desert Father of the Fourth Century, (Boston: Shambhala, 2004), p.87