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It seems to me that love is like an arrow sent forth by the will. If it travels with all the force that the will has, freed from all earthly things, and directed to God alone, it truly must wound His Majesty. Thus, fixed in God Himself, who is love, it is brought back from there with the greatest gain...The tremendous gain drawn from this kind of prayer is clearly recognized through the effects, the virtues, the living faith and the contempt for the world left in the soul.

O Jesus! how happy I would be if I had been faithful, but alas! often in the evening I am sad because I feel I could have corresponded better with your graces... If I were more united to You, more charitable with my sisters, more humble and more mortified, I would feel less sorrow when I talk with you in prayer. And yet, O my God, very far from becoming discouraged at the sight of my miseries, I come to you with confidence, recalling that "those who are well do not need a doctor but the sick do."

Contemplation is nothing else but a secret, peaceful, and loving infusion of God, which, if admitted, will set the soul on fire with the spirit of love.

It's an amusing thing that even though we still have a thousand impediments and imperfections and our virtues have hardly begun to grow -and please, God, they might have begun- we are yet not ashamed to seek spiritual delights in prayer or to complain about dryness.

To secure a hearing there is no need to recite set prayers composed for the occasion. . . .
I have not the courage to search through books for beautiful prayers; they are so numerous, that it would only make my head ache, and besides, each one is more lovely than the other. Unable either to say them all or to choose between them, I do as a child would do who cannot read-I say just what I want to say to God, quite simply and He never fails to understand.

You may be sure, if you do all you can and prepare yourselves for contemplation as I have described, that if He does not grant it to you, He is keeping back this consolation in reserve only to give it to you all at once in heaven.

Mark well, however, that self-knowledge is indispensable, even for those whom God takes to dwell in the same mansion with Himself. Nothing else, however elevated, perfects the soul which must never seek to forget its own nothingness. Let humility be always at work, like the bee at the honeycomb, or all will be lost. But, remember, the bee leaves its hive to fly in search of flowers and the soul should sometimes cease thinking of itself to rise in meditation on the grandeur and majesty of its God. It will learn its own baseness better thus than by self-contemplation, and will be freer from the reptiles which enter the first room where self-knowledge is acquired.

I have within me the prayer of Jesus Christ, the Divine Adorer. It takes me to souls and to the Father.

Now I ask You, Lord, not to abandon me at any time in my recollection, for I am a squanderer of my soul.

...I imagine her passing by, so beautiful, so calm and so majestic, so absorbed in recollection of the Word of God within her. Like Him, her prayer was always this: "Ecce. Here I am." Who? "The servant of the Lord," the lowliest of His creatures: she, His Mother! Her humility was so real, for she was always forgetful of self, free from all anxiety.

Don't imagine that, if you had a great deal of time, you would spend more of it in prayer. Get rid of that idea; it is no hindrance to prayer to spend your time well.

Be therefore earnest in prayer, and hope in detachment and emptiness. Your good will not be long in coming.