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And without this purgation it will be wholly unable to feel or experience the satisfaction of all this abundance of spiritual sweetness. For one single affection remaining in the spirit, or one particular thing to which, actually or habitually, it clings, suffices to hinder it from feeling or experiencing or communicating the delicacy and intimate sweetness of the spirit of love, which contains within itself all sweetness to a most eminent degree.

Many of these beginners ...feel an aversion toward adapting their will to God's. Hence they frequently believe that what is not their will, or brings them no satisfaction, is not God's will, and, on the other hand, that if they are satisfied, God is too. They measure God by themselves and not themselves by God...

Have an intimate desire that His Majesty grant you what he knows you lack for his honor.

What do you ask, then, and seek, my soul? Yours is all of this, and all is for you. Do not engage yourself in something less, nor pay heed to the crumbs which fall from your Father's table. Go forth and exult in your Glory! Hide yourself in It and rejoice, and you will obtain the supplications of your heart.

Live in faith and hope even though you are in darkness, for in this darkness God enfolds the soul. Cast your cares upon God, for you are His, and He will never forget you.

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.

...He brought about the reconciliation and union of the human race with God through grace. The Lord achieved this...at the moment in which he was most annihilated... The journey, then, does not consist in consolations, delights, and spiritual feelings, but in the living death of the cross, sensory and spiritual, exterior and interior.

Let the soul, then, be 'enclosed' without anxiety. He who, when the doors were shut, entered bodily among His disciples and said 'Peace be with you' in an unexpected and inconceivable way, will enter spiritually into the soul when it keeps the door of its powers closed-that is, memory, understanding and will.

Reflect that the most delicate flower loses its fragrance and withers fastest; therefore guard yourself against seeking to walk in a spirit of delight, for you will not be constant. Choose rather for yourself a robust spirit, detached from everything, and you will discover abundant peace and sweetness, for delicious and durable fruit is gathered in a cold and dry climate.

The soul which does not attain to the degree of purity corresponding with the light and vocation it has received from God can never be wholly content and at peace.

O my God, the more gently you touch, the more you are hidden in the purified souls of those who have made themselves aliens on earth, and whom you hide in the secret of your face.

... When there is union of love, the image of the Beloved is so sketched in the will and drawn so vividly, that it is true to say that the Beloved lives in the lover and the lover in the Beloved...The reason is, that in the union and transformation of love, each gives possession of self to the other, and each leaves and exchanges self for the other. Thus each one lives in the other and is the other, and both are one in the transformation of love.