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They are too attached to their honor. . . . These souls, for the most part, grieve over anything said against them. They do not embrace the cross but drag it along, and so it hurts and wearies them and breaks them to pieces. However, if the cross is loved, it is easy to bear, this is certain.

To obtain an answer to the requests we bear in our hearts, there is no better means than to concentrate the strength of our prayer upon what is more pleasing to God.

Would it be better, perhaps, to keep still about my needs, hoping You will provide the remedy for them? Certainly not; for You, my Lord and my delight, knowing the many needs there must be and the comfort it is for us to rely on You, tell us to ask you and that You will not fail to give.

When things that are irritable or disagreeable befall me, instead of assuming an air of sadness, I respond by a smile. At first I was not always successful, but now it is a habit which I am very happy to have acquired.

Oh, what a good friend You make, my Lord! How You proceed by favoring and enduring. You wait for others to adapt to Your nature, and in the meanwhile You put up with theirs!

We must sweeten our minds by charitable thoughts. After that, the practice of patience will become almost natural.

Faith is obscure knowledge; it thus leads us to knowledge of something, but this something we do not get to see. This is the reason why it must also be said that the end we attain by way of faith is also itself a night: God, even in ecstatic union, remains hidden to us on earth. The eye of our soul is absolutely unable to sustain His dazzling light for which it gropes as in a dark night.

It is clear, then, that for the soul to come to unite itself perfectly with God through love and will, it must first be free from all desire of the will, howsoever slight. That is, that it must not intentionally and knowingly consent with the will to imperfections, and it must have power and liberty to be able not so to consent intentionally.

There is no reason to marvel at God's granting such sublime and strange gifts to souls he determines to favor. If we consider that He is God and that He bestows them as God, with infinite love and goodness, it does not seem unreasonable.

I have no other means of proving my love for you other than that of strewing flowers, that is, not allowing one little sacrifice to escape, not one look, one word, profiting by all the smallest things and doing them through love.

Who are we to be so astonished and chagrined by our weaknesses and even by our faults? The saints humbled themselves because of theirs and rose promptly without being discouraged.

We are like so many foolish peasant lads: we think we know something of Thee, yet it must be comparatively nothing, for there are profound secrets even in ourselves of which we know naught.