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The soul, because its searching for the Beloved is real and its love great, will not leave undone anything it can do itself. The soul that really loves God is not easygoing in its efforts to find the Son of God, the Beloved. Even when it has done all it can it is still unsatisfied, feeling it has done nothing.

Good works wrought in the season of spiritual dryness and hardness are like the freshness of the winter morning. What we then do for God in dryness of spirit is most precious in His eyes. It is then that we acquire abundant virtues and graces, and what we achieve with toil and labor is in general better, more perfect and lasting than what we acquire in spiritual sweetness.

What we need most in order to make progress is to be silent before this great God with our appetite and with our tongue, for the language he best hears is silent love.

In this interior union God communicates himself to the soul with such genuine love that neither the affection of a mother, with which she so tenderly caresses her child, nor a brother's love, nor any friendship is comparable to it.

It is right that the soul, as far as it is able, should work to purify itself, that it may merit that God take it into His Divine care and heal it of those imperfections before which it is helpless.

In these aridities the soul practices corporally and spiritually all the virtues, theological as well as cardinal and moral.

God highly esteems these works...done for him in aridity and hardship, for by such means the virtues and gifts are acquired in a high degree. Those acquired through this labor are for the most part more select, refined, and stable than if they were obtained with spiritual relish and enjoyment, for virtue takes root in dryness, difficulty, and labor, as God says to St. Paul: Virtue is made prefect in weakness.

He who falls alone remains alone in his fall, and he values his soul little since he entrusts it to himself alone.

In the patience and forbearance practiced in these voids and aridities, and through perseverance in its spiritual exercises without consolation or satisfaction, the soul practices the love of God, since it is no longer motivated by the attractive and savory gratification it finds in its work, but only by God.

For when the sensory delight and gratification coming from things are quenched, neither the devil, nor the world, nor sensuality has arms or power against the spirit.

True spirituality seeks for bitterness rather than sweetness in God, inclines to suffering rather than consolation. It knows that this is to follow Christ and deny self, while the other course is perhaps nothing but seeking oneself in God, which is the very opposite of love.

Those who now desire to question God or receive some vision or revelation are guilty not only of foolish behavior but of also offending Him by not fixing their eyes entirely on Christ and by living with the desire for some other novelty.