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Is there any freedom greater than the freedom to serve God? Is there any freedom more complete than union with Him? Does He not free us from ties of money and property and selfishness, of avarice and pride and inconstancy? Is He not the only true Emancipator? Who is free who does not love God?

To find God we must work ourselves according to our capacity. The soul therefore, remembering the saying of the Beloved 'Seek and you shall find', is resolved to seek Him actively and not rest until it finds Him. For there are many who do not want God to cost them anything except empty words.

It benefits me little to be alone making acts of devotion to our Lord, proposing and promising to do wonders in his service, if I then go away and when the occasion offers itself do everything the opposite. If his Majesty showed us his love by means of such works and frightful torments, how is it you want to please him only with words?

If a man is moved to love God apart from any sweetness he feels, he is already focusing his love upon God, who he does not feel.

Our good God ardently desires to give us the great treasure of His love; but He wants us to ask Him for it insistently, and to act in such a way that each work we perform will be a request for this love.

In all things I shall be content, knowing that the route I travel leads to Calvary. The thornier the path, the heavier the cross, the more consoled I shall be, because I desire to love you with a suffering love, a selfless love, an active love, with a firm, undivided, persevering love...I have promised you many things, but in no wise do I depend upon my own indolent spirit.

A Carmelite sanctifies herself in order to make all the Church's members holy... Let's live intimately united with Him, since one who loves tends to be united with the one loved. The fusing of two souls is done through love.

Divine spirit, divine life, divine love means this: he who does the will of God, knows God and loves Him. In fact, at the moment in which we do what God asks, with interior dedication, divine life becomes our life, God is found within ourselves.

If, by an impossibility, the good God Himself did not see my good deeds I would not be grieved. I love Him so much that I wish to give Him pleasure, even without Him knowing that it is I.

Is there any freedom greater than the freedom to serve God? Is there any freedom more complete than union with Him? Does He not free us from ties of money and property and selfishness, of avarice and pride and inconstancy? Is He not the only true Emancipator? Who is free who does not love God?

Only at the moment in which the soul for love of God divests itself of all that is not God - and love is just this! - can it be enlightened and transformed in God.

... When there is union of love, the image of the Beloved is so sketched in the will and drawn so vividly, that it is true to say that the Beloved lives in the lover and the lover in the Beloved....The reason is, that in the union and transformation of love, each gives possession of self to the other, and each leaves and exchanges self for the other. Thus each one lives in the other and is the other, and both are one in the transformation of love.