St. Isaac of Nineveh, or, as he is sometimes known, St. Isaac the Syrian, was born in the region of modern Qatar and lived during the seventh century. Ordained as the bishop of Nineveh sometime between 661 and 681 CE, Isaac withdrew from his ecclesiastical office after only five months, retiring to live as a monastic hermit in the mountains of southeastern Iraq. Translated from their original Syriac into a number of other languages, St. Isaac's spiritual writings have been read by Christian monastics for centuries. The present selection of one hundred and fifty-three short sayings by St. Isaac is drawn from both the First Part and the Second Part of his literary corpus, and it follows the sequence of these two volumes. (Texts from "Christian Late Antiquity 1", Gorgias Press 2006)