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Oh, what a sheer grace it is for the soul to be freed from the house of its senses! This good fortune, in my opinion, can only be understood by the ones who have tasted it. For then such persons will become clearly aware of the wretched servitude and the many miseries they suffered when they were subject to the activity of their faculties and appetites.

All the goodness we possess is lent to us, and God considers it His own work. God and His work is God.

Whenever anything disagreeable or displeasing happens to you, remember Christ crucified and be silent.

Even though your obligations and duties are difficult and disagreeable to you, you should not become dismayed, for this will not always be so. And God, Who proves the soul by a precept under the guise of a trial, will after a time accord it the experience of its own blessing and gain.

In such a way God manifests the decrees of His wisdom; He knows how to draw good from evil so wisely and beautifully, and to ordain to a greater good what was a cause of evil.

In all our necessities, trials, and difficulties, no better or safer aid exists for us than prayer and hope that God will provide for us by the means He desires.

Many of these beginners want God to desire what they want, and they become sad if they have to desire God's will. They frequently believe that what is not their will, or that which brings them no satisfaction, is not God's will, and on the other hand, that if they are satisfied, God is too.

Thus you must undertake all things, agreeable or disagreeable, for the sole purpose of pleasing God through them.

If individuals resolutely submit to carrying the cross, if they decidedly want to find and endure trial in all things for God, they will discover in all of them great relief and sweetness.

It is in that soul in which less of its own appetites and pleasures dwell that He dwells more alone, more pleased, and more as though in His own house, ruling and governing it.

As every one of the saints received the gifts of God in a different way, so every one of them sings his praises in a different way, and yet all harmonize in one concert of love.

It is greatly to be lamented that, when God has granted them strength to break other and stouter cords-- namely, affections for sins and vanities -- they should fail to attain to such blessing because they have not shaken off some childish thing which God had bidden them conquer for love of Him, and which is nothing more than a thread or a hair.