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...or if, as I have said, you are very careful about your prayer, you will soon find yourselves gradually reaching the summit of the mountain without knowing how. But how harsh it sounds to say that we must take pleasure in nothing, unless we also say what consolations and delights this renunciation brings in its train, and what a great gain it is, even in this life!

Because we are so miserable, we become attached to sensible fervor, to experiencing the love of God sensibly, and often we go to prayer in search of the sensible consolation of God but not for God Himself.

Love consists not in feeling great things but in having great detachment and in suffering for the Beloved.

I know that I was made only for Him, that I am going only to Him, that 'union' is 'our desires' or rather 'our desire.' And if I wish it, all in me will be only for Jesus, by Jesus, in Jesus, In Christo. He will take possession of me, He will annihilate me, and I will be lost, annihilated in Him - for all His merits are mine, and my vocation is to offer them to His Father.

These aridities, then, make people walk with purity in the love of God. No longer are they moved to act by the delight and satisfaction they find in a work, as perhaps they were when they derived this from their deeds, but by the desire of pleasing God.

Trials help greatly to detach us from earth. They make us look to God, rather than to this world.

Perseverance through all misfortunes confers strength and courage on it (the soul). The painful purification from all sensible desires and pleasures leads it to freedom of spirit in which the twelve fruits of the Holy Spirit mature.

For Christ desire to enter into complete nakedness, emptiness and poverty in everything.

The highest perfection obviously does not consist in interior delights or in great raptures or in visions or in the spirit of prophecy but in having our will so much in conformity with God's will that there is nothing we know He wills that we do not want with all our desire, and in accepting the bitter as happily as we do the delightful when we know that His Majesty desires it. This seems most difficult (not the doing of it, but this being content with what completely contradicts our nature); and indeed it truly is difficult. But love has this strength if it is perfect, for we forget about pleasing ourselves in order to please the one we love.

It is the nature of perfect love to seek or accept nothing for itself, to attribute nothing to itself, but to refer all to the Beloved. If this be true of earthly love, how much more so of the love of God...

In our difficulties we should rather accept them than desire to be freed from them; it is the acceptance that delivers us.

First, have a habitual desire to imitate Christ in all your deeds by bringing your life into conformity with His. You must then study His life in order to know how to imitate Him and behave in all events as He would.