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It seems to the soul that the entire universe is a sea of love in which it is engulfed, for conscious of the living point or center of love within itself, it is unable to catch sight of the boundaries of this love.

...it is supreme ignorance for the soul to think that it will be able to pass to this high estate of union with God if first it void not the desire of all things, natural and supernatural, which may hinder it...for there is the greatest possible distance between these things and that which comes to pass in this estate, which is naught else than transformation in God.

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.

In savoring a finite joy
the very most one can expect
is to enfeeble and destroy
our taste, leaving the palate wrecked;
for all the sweetness there may be
I’ll never throw away my soul…

Poem For All the Beauty there May Be

Love produces such likeness in this transformation of lovers that one can say each is the other and both are one. 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.

To endure all things with a calm and untroubled mind not only brings many blessings to the soul, but also enables us to have clear judgement about them, and to take appropriate steps for their betterment.

God repays trials very well with divine goods for soul and body - there is not a trial which does not have a corresponding and considerable reward.

Keep yourself from setting your thoughts upon what happens in the community, and still more from speaking of it except to the proper person at the proper time...For if you want to ponder on all that happens you would always discover something amiss even if you lived among angels.

For You, O divine life, never kill unless to give life, never wound unless to heal.

Those who walk in the love of God seek neither their own gain nor their reward, but only to lose all things and themselves for God; and this loss they judge to be their gain.

Many of these beginners will make numerous plans and great resolutions, but since they are not humble and have no distrust of themselves, the more resolves they make the more they break, and the greater becomes their anger.

To obtain an answer to the requests we bear in our hearts, there is no better means than to concentrate the strength of our prayer upon what is more pleasing to God.