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If we fall, an act of love will set all right, and Jesus smiles. He helps us without seeming to do so; and the tears which sinners cause Him to shed are wiped away by our feeble love. Love can do all things.

He has suffered your committing a thousand ugly offenses and abominations against Him, and this suffering wasn't enough for Him to cease looking at you. Is it too much to ask you to turn your eyes from these exterior things in order to look at Him sometimes?

I want to have a character that is strong. I'll never allow myself to be led by feelings or by my heart but by reason and conscience.

How does one acquire this love? By being determined to work and to suffer, and to do so when the occasion arises. It is indeed true that by thinking of what we owe the Lord, of who He is, and what we are, a soul's determination grows, and
that this thinking is very meritorious and appropriate.

I will love God alone and will not have the misfortune of attaching myself to creatures, now that my heart perceives what He has in store for those who love Him.

In this arid and obscure night the soul undergoes a thorough reform in its imperfections of avarice, in which it coveted various spiritual objects and was never content with any of its spiritual exercises.

...the harm done to us by our failure to understand well this humility and self-knowledge…self-knowledge is the most important thing for us.

To acquire the holy love of God the best means is to live in the presence of God.

Even the poorest and the one most bowed down under the weight of sins can stand before the Lord and pray for someone else. First, because the Lord is not only just but merciful. And second, because there can be nothing more pleasing to God than a sincere prayer.

...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!

‘You are dead and your life is hidden with Christ in God’ (Col. 3:3). There is the condition: we must be ‘dead’, otherwise we may be hidden in God sometimes, but we do not live habitually in Him; for all our sensitiveness, our self-seeking and such-like, causes us to depart from Him.

I give thanks to Jesus for making me walk in darkness, and in the darkness I enjoy profound peace. Indeed, I consent to remain through all my religious life in the gloomy passage into which He has led me. I desire only that my darkness may obtain light for sinners.