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Because the light and wisdom of this contemplation is very bright and pure, and the soul in which it shines is dark and impure, a person will be deeply afflicted on receiving it.

One must erase the word discouragement from one’s dictionary of love; the more you sense your weakness and meet with difficulties in your recollection, the more Our Lord seems hidden — all the more you ought to rejoice for then you are giving to Him.

The door by which we can enter this castle is prayer. It is absurd to think that we can enter Heaven without first entering our own souls -- without getting to know ourselves, and reflecting upon the wretchedness of our nature and what we owe to God, and continually imploring His mercy.

It is in prayer that the soul learns to know Jesus and thus to love him. Since love cannot be satisfied with difference but with equality, the result is union in similarity.

Contemplation is perceived more frequently in the will under the form of love, than in the intellect under the form of knowledge.

Think how Our Lady must have felt when, after the Incarnation, she possessed within her the Incarnate Word, the gift of God! In what depths of silence, of recollection, of adoration, she must have lived in the center of her soul, in order to embrace that God whose Mother she was! He is in us. Let us keep close to Him in that silence, that love of the Virgin Mother.

To what a height of glory we are called! I understand that silence, the recollection of the saints, who could no longer emerge from their contemplation. The good God led them to the summit of the mountain, where union between Himself and the soul that has become His bride is consummated.

Feed not your spirit on anything but God. Cast off concern about things, and bear peace and recollection in your heart.

God deliver us from spiritual people who are so spiritual that they want to turn everything into perfect contemplation, come what may.  It would be a bad business for us if we could not seek God until we were dead to the world. Neither Magdalene, nor the woman of Samaria, nor the Canaanite woman was dead to the world when she found him.

I suppose I ought to be distressed that I so often fall asleep during meditation and thanksgiving after Holy Communion, but I reflect that little children, asleep or awake, are equally dear to their parents; that to perform operations doctors put their patients to sleep; and finally, that 'The Lord knoweth our frame. He remembereth that we are but dust.' Ps. 102: 14.

Then, when the hour of humiliation comes, when one is brought to nothing, she will remember that short sentence, ‘But Jesus made no further answer’, and she too will be silent, keeping all her strength — that strength we draw from silence — for the Lord. When she is abandoned, forsaken, in anguish — anguish such as that which drew from Our Lord the great cry, ‘Why hast Thou forsaken me? (Mk. 15:34) — she will remember that prayer, ‘That they may have my joy fulfilled in them’ (Jn.17:13) and draining to the dregs the chalice prepared by the Father, she will find a heavenly sweetness in its bitterness.

The hours of adoration before the Highest Good and the listening for the voice of the Eucharistic God are simultaneously "meditation on the Law of the Lord" and "watching in prayer." But the highest level is reached "when the Law is deep within our hearts" (Ps 40:8), when we are so united with the triune God whose temple we are, that his Spirit rules all we do or do not do. Then it does not mean we are forsaking the Lord when we do the work that obedience requires of us. Work is unavoidable as long as we are subject to nature's laws and to the necessities of life.