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Always be more disposed toward giving to others than giving to yourself, and thus you will not be envious of nor selfish toward your neighbor. This is to be understood from the viewpoint of perfection, for God is angered with those who do not give precedence to His good pleasure over that of men.

Preserve a habitual remembrance of eternal life, recalling that those who hold themselves the lowest and poorest and least of all will enjoy the highest dominion and glory in God.

Lonely valleys are quiet, pleasant, cool, shady and flowing with fresh waters; in the variety of their groves and in the sweet song of the birds, they afford abundant recreation and delight...and in their solitude and silence they refresh and give rest. These valleys are what my Beloved is to me.

The power and the tenacity of love is great, for love captures and binds God Himself.

...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.

See that you are not suddenly saddened by the adversities of this world, for you do not know the good they bring, being ordained in the judgments of God for the everlasting joy of the elect.

After God places these three last kinds of good in the soul, he no longer remembers her former ugliness and sin, as he declares through Ezekiel [Ez. 18:22], for on account of these goods she is very agreeable to him. And once he has blotted out this sin and ugliness, he no longer reproaches her for it, or fails to impart more favors, since he never judges a thing twice [Na. 1:9].

There is no companionship which affords comfort to the soul that longs for God; indeed, until she finds Him everything causes greater solitude.

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...

Some are very insistent that their spiritual director allow them to do what they themselves want to do...They are under the impression that they do not serve God when they are not allowed to do what they want.

But they, O my God and my life, will see and experience Your mild touch, who withdraw from the world and become mild, bringing the mild into harmony with the mild, thus enabling themselves to experience and enjoy You.

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.