St. John of Kronstadt

An amazing thing: no matter how much we worry about our health, no matter how we take care of ourselves, no matter how healthy and pleasant foods we eat, no matter how healthy drinks we drink, no matter how much we take walks in the fresh air,and in the end it all comes out that we are subject to disease and decay.

The saints, who despised the flesh, mortified it by incessant abstinence and fasting, lying on the bare ground, vigil, toil, unceasing prayer, immortalized both their soul and their flesh: our bodies, much nourished and sweetly nourished, emit a stench after death, and sometimes even during life, and their bodies are fragrant and bloom both in life and in death.

An amazing thing: we, creating, destroy our body, and they, destroying, created; we, pouring fragrances on it, do not avoid its stench, but they, caring not for the fragrance of the body, but for the soul to be a fragrance for God, fragrant their bodies.

My brethren! Understand the task, the purpose of your life. We must mortify the many-passionate body or carnal passions through abstinence, labor, prayer, and not revive it and its passions through delicacy, satiety, laziness. - St. John of Kronstadt