"The enemy knows that prayer is our invisible weapon against him, and so he tries to keep us from praying. He fills us with a desire for secular learning, and encourages us to spend our time on studies that we have already renounced. Let us resist his suggestions; otherwise, if we neglect our own fields and go wandering elsewhere, we shall harvest thorns and thistles instead of figs and grapes. 'For the wisdom of this world is folly in God's sight' (1 Corinthians 3:19)."
(St. John of Karpathos, an excerpt from Texts for the Monks in India in The Philolaklia, Volume 1, p. 301.)