What are you, or what will you be? I. Consider, are you not a wretched man, but what will you be? for what you are is a moment, but what you will be is for ever. Be not therefore slothful to yourself; exercise in a brief time what you will possess for eternity; let the desire of rewards repel the sloth of temporal labour. Be spiritual, if you are not slothful; but if the world provokes you, see what you should flee, what you should follow, and why you do not follow that which never flees. Why are you impatient in baser things, you who could be more precious in better things? Be not uncertain of the certain better things, and be not certain of the perishable. You look in others for what others will see in you. What does it profit to see in the waters a delightful shadow? What does it profit you to exult or rejoice through dreams?
Yet these dreams, however long, are brief for each one of us; for the day of the whole world is, as it were, that of a single, most obscure night, while the nights themselves are but dreams. Awake, then, O my son, from the night; seek the light, that you may be seen and may see; kindle the lamp and read; beware lest you sleep, lest you be led astray by dreams and be deceived by an imagined falsehood, so that you believe to be true the things that are false, and rising up afterward grieve that you were deceived. Your life is a wheel; daily it runs on, it does not wait for you: go along with it. Therefore from this present moment prepare your provisions for yourself; you are commanded to depart from another's field; see that you do not sell what is your own. Here you have nothing, O man, in the earth from which you were born naked, and in which you shall be dissolved into dust.
Do not sell heaven, where the eternal inheritance is — provided you have not lost it. But if you have lost it, sell your very self, that you may be able to recover it. What did I say — sell your very self? Sell your vices, and buy life. Perhaps you ask what these are? First of all, sell pride as the foremost vice before all else, and from it happily buy humility, by which you may become like to Christ, who says: 'Learn of me, for I am meek and humble of heart' (Matt. 11:29). By a shorter reckoning these things, once sold off entirely, will be sold; and look down upon lesser things through the desire of possessing, since once the root of any tree is cut out, the branches are reckoned of no great account. Know what you should sell unto the destruction of this flesh, that the spirit may be safe in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 5:5):
gluttony, covetousness, fornication, anger, sadness, sloth, vainglory, envy — which it would have been better had you lost, indeed even if you had received nothing in their place.