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When we keep little we recognize our own nothingness and expect everything from the goodness of God, exactly as a little child expects everything from its father. Nothing worries us, not even the amassing of spiritual riches.

Let nothing disturb you, be it good or bad. Give up everything else except your peace of mind. When you feel restless, sad, sorrowful and embittered, look for the cause, and if it is not worth being sorry about (and nothing that does not offend God is worth being sorry about), get rid of your anxiety; if you do not see the causes but feel restless and dissatisfied all the same, put up with it, arm yourself with patience, let the storm pass, and your inner peace will return.

Make sacrifices, it is absolutely necessary that you put mortification into your life. When one wishes to be master of himself, master of his body and sensory faculties, these must be mortified.

Our body has this defect that, the more it is provided care and comforts, the more needs and desires it finds.

The poverty of the Carmelite is very great. She can possess nothing, and this is an assurance that her whole capacity for possessing is filled with God alone. By being poor she becomes more like her divine Spouse, who did not have a place to lay His head. The Carmelite possesses God alone.

Many of these beginners have also at times great spiritual avarice. They will be found to be discontented with the spirituality which God gives them; and they are very disconsolate and querulous because they find not in spiritual things the consolation that they would desire.

It is a serious evil to have more regard for God's blessings than for God Himself: prayer and detachment.

Those who now desire to question God or receive some vision or revelation are guilty not only of foolish behavior but of also offending Him by not fixing their eyes entirely on Christ and by living with the desire for some other novelty.

When the evening of life comes, I shall stand before You with empty hands, because I do not ask You, my God, to take account of my works. All our good deeds are blemished in Your eyes. I wish therefore to be robed with Your own justice, and to receive from Your love the everlasting gift of Yourself. I desire no other throne but You, O my Beloved!

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.

O soul, most beautiful of creatures, who desire so ardently to know that place where your Beloved dwells in order to seek Him and unite yourself to Him; you yourself are the retreat where He takes refuge, the dwelling where He hides Himself.

We must dig deeply in Christ. He is like a rich mine with many pockets containing treasures: however deep we dig we will never find their end or their limit. Indeed, in every pocket new seams of fresh riches are discovered on all sides.