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If I did not suffer from moment to moment, I would not be able to keep patience, but I see only the present moment; I forget the past and take care not to peer into the future.

He is always with you, be always with Him, through all your actions, in your sufferings, when your body is exhausted, remain in His sight, see Him present, living in your soul.

Time is but a shadow, a dream; already God sees us in glory and takes joy in our eternal beatitude. How this thought helps my soul! I understand then why He lets us suffer.

A supernatural soul does not stop to deal with secondary causes, but solely with God. And how life thus becomes simplified! ... then the soul is truly great, truly free, for its will is ‘enclosed’ in that of God.

In Heaven it will be my task to attract souls by helping them to depart from themselves so they can cling to God in a completely simple and loving movement, to keep them in a great inner silence that permits God to impress Himself on them and to change them into Himself.

I have abandoned my free will to You so that henceforth You alone will be the possessor of my heart and Your holy Will the rule of my actions. I desire to love You with a patient love, a love dead to self - that is, a love which completely abandons me to You; an active love; to sum it all up, a solid love with no division within itself and which will stand regardless of what may happen.

The relationship of the soul to God as God foresaw it from all eternity as the goal of her (the soul's) creation, simply cannot be more fittingly designated than as a nuptial bond.

To belong wholly to God, to give oneself to Him, to His service, for love, this is the vocation, not only of all the elect but of every Christian; whether consecrated or not, man or woman.

There is another reason also why the soul has traveled safely in this obscurity; it has suffered: for the way of suffering is safer, and also more profitable, than that of rejoicing and of action. In suffering God gives strength, but in action and in joy the soul does but show its own weakness and imperfections. And in suffering, the soul practices and acquires virtue, and becomes pure, wiser, and more cautious.

For by doing what God demands of us with total surrender of our innermost being, we cause the divine life to become our own inner life. Entering into ourselves, we find God in our own selves.

Let us thank God to have united our souls by the bond of true friendship, which consists in mutually perfectioning ourselves to get closer to God.

The soul’s preparation for this union is not that it should understand or perceive or feel or imagine anything concerning either God or anything else, but that it should have purity and love—that is, perfect resignation and detachment from everything for God’s sake alone.