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If a person is not quite blind, that person often refuses to be led by a guide. Since he sees a little, he thinks it is best to go in whatever direction he can distinguish because he sees no better direction. So he can lead astray a guide who sees more than he, for after all, he tells the guide where to go. Also a soul may lean on any knowledge or feeling of its own. However great this knowledge might be, it is small and far different from what God is. A soul must pass beyond everything to unknowing.

He hollows out abysses in my soul, abysses He alone can fill.

I only want you to be warned, that if you would progress a long way on this road and ascend to the Mansions of your desire, the important thing is not to think much, but to love much.

I want to point out to souls the means that I have always found so completely successful, to tell them there is only one thing to do here below-to offer Our Lord the flowers of little sacrifices and win Him by our caresses. That is how I have won Him, and that is why I shall be made so welcome.

There is no room for the boundless gifts of God save in a heart that is empty and solitary, and they enter none but such a heart.

Have great confidence, for it is necessary not to hold back one's desires, but to believe in God that if we try we shall little by little, even though it may not be soon, reach the state the saints did with His help. For if they had never determined to desire and seek this state little by little in practice they would never have mounted so high.

If the soul then does as much as it can on its own part, namely if it succeeds in being empty and dispossessed of all things, it is impossible that God should fail to do His part by communicating Himself to it, at least in secret silence: more impossible even than the absurd hypothesis that the ray of the sun should fail to shine in a serene sky.

We have to be on our guard against wanting to judge for ourselves what point we have reached in the way of pure love. Only God knows this. What we recognize of ourselves, also of our faults and failings, is only the illuminated part on the surface. The deep roots are also hidden from us. God, who knows these, can purify them.

Reflect upon the providence and wisdom of God in all created things and praise Him in them all.

So the person no longer gets annoyed and upset at herself because of her faults, not at her neighbor because of his, nor will she be displeased at God and disrespectfully quarrelsome for not making her good at once!

Remember that you have but one soul and have but once to die; no more than one short life, which is yours and yours only; that there is but one glory and that is eternal.

The end cannot be reached without adopting the means, and since Our Lord had made me understand that it was through the cross He would give me souls, the more crosses I encountered the stronger became my attraction to suffering.