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If you want to find a hidden treasure you must enter the hiding place secretly, and once you have discovered it, you will also be hidden just as the treasure is hidden. Since, then, your beloved Bridegroom is the treasure hidden in a field for which the wise merchant sold all his possessions [Mt. 13:44], and that field is your soul, in order to find him you should forget all your possessions and all creatures and hide in the secret inner room of your spirit and there, closing the door behind you (your will to all things), you should pray to your Father in secret [Mt. 6:6]. Remaining hidden with him, you will experience him in hiding, that is, in a way transcending all language and feeling.

The Beloved cares for nothing else but love. The soul therefore, anxious to please him perfectly, occupies itself unceasingly in pure love of God.

The soul has made known the manner of preparing oneself to begin this journey: to pursue delights and satisfactions no longer, and to overcome temptations and difficulties through fortitude. This is the practice of self-knowledge, the first requirement of advancing to the knowledge of God.

Keep in mind what the apostle St. James says: If any man thinks himself to be religious and does not control his tongue, that man's religion is useless." (James 1:26) This is to be understood of inward as well as outward chatter.

Aware of their own dryness and wretchedness, the thought of them being more advanced than others does not even occur in its first movements.

To have God in everything a soul must have nothing in everything, for how can a heart belong in any way to two people at once?

If a person has more patience in suffering and more forbearance in going without satisfaction, it is a sign that he is more proficient in virtue.

This sweetness and trace of himself that God leaves in the soul greatly lightens her and makes her run after him. For then the soul does very little or nothing of her own in order to advance on this road; rather, she is moved and attracted by the divine footprints, not only to go out, but even to run along this road in many ways, as we said.

O you souls who wish to go on with so much safety and consolation, if you knew how pleasing to God is suffering, and how much it helps in acquiring other good things, you would never seek consolation in anything; but you would rather look upon it as a great happiness to bear the Cross of the Lord.

What joy for the soul to learn that God never abandons it even in serious sin, how much less when it is in a state of grace.

It is a great favor from God when he darkens [the faculties of the soul] and impoverishes the soul in such a way that it cannot err with them. And if one does not err in this, what need is there in order to be right other than to walk along the level road of the law of God and of the Church and live only in dark and true faith and certain hope and complete charity, expecting all our blessings in heaven, living here below like pilgrims, the poor, the exiled, orphans, the thirsty, without a road and without anything, hoping for everything in heaven?

The divine light is here very appropriately called the approaches of Dawn, that is, twilight.  For as the twilight of the morn disperses the light of day, so the mind, tranquil and reposing in God, is raised up from the darkness of natural knowledge to the morning light of the supernatural knowledge of God.