On smoking
Man has distorted even bodily pleasures themselves… for the sake of taste, and partly for breathing, he has invented, and almost without ceasing lets out, a pungent and foul-smelling smoke, offering it as a constant sacrifice to the demon living in the body; with this smoke he saturates the air of his dwelling and outside it, and above all he himself is saturated with this foul smell — and this unceasing coarsening of his own senses and heart, constantly swallowed up by smoke, cannot but affect the delicacy of the heart's feelings; it gives them a carnal, coarse and sensual character. St John of Kronstadt
Tobacco slackens the soul, multiplies and strengthens the passions, darkens the mind and destroys bodily health by a slow death. Irritability and melancholy are the result of a soul made sick by smoking tobacco. St Ambrose of Optina
When a person smokes, his soul is already captive to demonic powers. Know that not long before the (universal) Flood, people carried small jugs full of water about with them and offered this water to one another. They did not even know that they would perish by water. And today everyone carries matches or a lighter in his pocket — that is, fire. The first world was destroyed by water for its lawlessness, and the present one is being prepared for destruction by fire; that is why many smoke, and we shall burn, we shall turn to ashes. Archimandrite Ambrose (Yurasov)
What strikes one is the baseness and paltriness of the motives of beginning smokers — the wish to act like everyone else, fear of ridicule, the wish to rise in others' eyes. It is at once the psychology of a coward and of a sly one. After this comes estrangement from family and friends. From the aesthetic point of view it is ugliness, especially intolerable in girls. From the psychological point of view, smoking opens the door to everything forbidden and depraved. Smoking and every kind of narcotic deaden our sense of purity and chastity. The first cigarette is the first fall, the loss of innocence. It is not false puritanism but direct feeling and deep conviction that move me to say this. Ask any smoker and you will be convinced that starting to smoke was in some sense a fall for him. Father Alexander Elchaninov
