Our greatest protection is self-knowledge, and to avoid the delusion that we are seeing ourselves when we are in reality looking at something else. This is what happens to those who do not scrutinize themselves. What they see is strength, beauty, reputation, political power, abundant wealth, pomp, self-importance, bodily stature, a certain grace of form or the like, and they think this is what they are. Such persons make very poor guardians of themselves: because of their absorption in what is foreign to them, they overlook what is proper to them and leave it unguarded.
—Gregory of Nyssa, Commentary on the Song of Songs (via wesleyhill)
