The Sayings of the Desert Fathers

A collection of what the monks of Egypt actually said, written down after they were dead by people who had heard it from people who had heard it. Nothing in it is systematic. A brother asks a word and an old man gives him one sentence, and the sentence is usually about not judging anyone, or about staying in the cell, or about what to do when you have failed again. It survives in two great arrangements, one alphabetical by the father who spoke and one by subject, and it is the raw material behind almost all later Orthodox ascetic writing. Read straight through it is also very funny, which is not an accident.