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If your nature provides you with ... a battleground, do not be discouraged ... love your wretchedness, for it is upon that that God exercises His mercy! When the sight of it plunges you into sadness, or drives you in upon yourself, that is self-love. In your hours of weakness, go and take refuge in the prayer of the Divine Master.

If you want to find a hidden treasure you must enter the hiding place secretly, and once you have discovered it, you will also be hidden just as the treasure is hidden. Since, then, your beloved Bridegroom is the treasure hidden in a field for which the wise merchant sold all his possessions [Mt. 13:44], and that field is your soul, in order to find him you should forget all your possessions and all creatures and hide in the secret inner room of your spirit and there, closing the door behind you (your will to all things), you should pray to your Father in secret [Mt. 6:6]. Remaining hidden with him, you will experience him in hiding, that is, in a way transcending all language and feeling.

I do not wish to store up merits for heaven, I want to work for Thy Love alone, with the single goal of pleasing Thee, of bringing consolation to Thy Sacred Heart and of saving souls who Thou wilt love eternally.

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.

When we have a friend in our home, we don't leave him alone; but from time to time, even when we are busy, we try to go to him to speak to him. Do the same with Jesus. In the beginning it will be hard to recollect yourself, but afterwards it will become habitual for you to be with God.

...we render God the most true and acceptable service by caring only for His honor and glory and forgetting ourselves, our advantages, comfort and happiness. How can we be self-oblivious, while keeping ourselves under such strict control that we are afraid to move, or even to think, or to leave our minds enough liberty to desire God's greater glory and to rejoice in the glory which He possesses? When His Majesty wishes the mind to rest from working He employs it in another manner, giving it a light and knowledge far above any obtainable by its own efforts and absorbing it entirely into Himself. Then, though it knows not how, it is filled with wisdom such as it could never gain for itself by striving to suspend the thoughts.

Love suffers neither delay nor repose, being always eager to suffer for the Beloved.

I can boast only of His mercy, and since I cannot cease being what I have been, I have no other remedy than to approach His mercy and to trust in the merits of His Son and of the Virgin, His Mother.

The entire trinity rests within us, this whole mystery that will be our vision in Heaven.

A soul united to Jesus and identified with him can do everything. It seems to me that this can be reached only by prayer.

We should never fear the battle when the good of our neighbor is involved.

Now let us talk about the detachment we ought to have, for detachment, if it is practiced with perfection, includes everything. I say it includes everything because if we embrace the Creator and care not at all for the whole of creation, His Majesty will infuse the virtues. Doing little by little what we can, we will have hardly anything else to fight against; it is the Lord who in our defense takes up the battle against the demons and against the world.