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O Eternal Word, utterance of my God, I want to spend my life listening to you, to become totally teachable so that I might learn all from you. Through all darkness, all emptiness, all powerlessness, I want to keep my eyes fixed on you and to remain under your great light. O my Beloved Star, so fascinate me that I may never be able to leave your radiance.

Saint Catherine of Siena loved to say in the silence of her soul: "I am sought, I am loved."  That is what is true.

How people delude themselves as to the real meaning of union with God! There are those who think they have reached it because they enjoy sensible consolations; they make one think of children playing with ashes which the wind blows away. No. no! True union lies not in enjoyment, but in self-abnegation.

If we thought more about our ‘origin’, dependence on created things would seem so futile that we should only despise them... The soul that is aware of this greatness enters into the holy freedom of the children of God, that is, it passes beyond all created things and beyond itself.

Abandonment! It is this which sets us free for God! ... Oh! when all was in confusion, when the present had been so sad and the future seemed even worse, I closed my eyes, I abandoned myself as a child in the arms of its Father who is in heaven.

Today I had the joy of offering Jesus several sacrifices with respect to my dominant fault, but how much they cost me! There I recognized my weakness. When I am unjustly reproved, I feel as though the blood were boiling in my veins. My whole being rises in revolt! ... but Our Lord was with me. I heard His voice deep down in my heart and then I was ready to bear everything for love of Him.

Prayer is a repose, a relaxation. One must come in total simplicity to the One whom one loves, holding oneself near to Him as a small child in its mother’s arms, allowing one’s heart to go out ...

Fortunately, while being Martha one can remain like Mary Magdalene always near the Master, contemplating Him with a wholly loving look.

Always love prayer, and when I say prayer, I don't mean so much imposing on yourself a lot of vocal prayers to be recited every day, as much as that elevation of the soul towards God through all things that establishes us in a kind of continual communion with the Holy Trinity by quite simply doing everything in Their presence.

Seeing the silence which reigns in His creature, observing how it is wholly recollected in its interior solitude, the Creator greatly desires its beauty. He leads it into the immense, infinite solitude, into that spacious place of which the Psalmist sings, which is His very self. ‘I will enter into the powers of the Lord’.

The God I serve is a living God... A life of prayer is the essence of the Carmelite vocation; the heart to heart communion that never ends, because when one loves, one no longer belongs to oneself but to the Beloved, and so lives more in Him than in oneself.

If your nature provides you with ... a battleground, do not be discouraged ... love your wretchedness, for it is upon that that God exercises His mercy! When the sight of it plunges you into sadness, or drives you in upon yourself, that is self-love. In your hours of weakness, go and take refuge in the prayer of the Divine Master.