The best use one can make of his mind is to distrust it.

Trouble and perplexity drive me to prayer, and prayer drives away perplexity and trouble.

It is when God appears to have abandoned us that we must abandon ourselves most wholly to God.

When we are truly in this interior simplicity our whole appearance is franker, more natural. This true simplicity. . . makes us conscious of a certain openness, gentleness, innocence, gaiety, and serenity. O, how amiable this simplicity is! Who will give it to me? I leave all for this. It is the pearl of the Gospel.

So long as we are full of self we are shocked at the faults of others. Let us think often of our own sin, and we shall be lenient to the sins of others.

I had often heard Mentor say, that the voluptuous were never brave, and I now found by experience that it was true; for the Cyprians whose jollity had been so extravagant and tumultuous, now sunk under a sense of their danger and wept like women. I heard nothing but the screams of terror and the wailings of hopeless distress. Some lamented the loss of pleasures that were never to return; but none had presence of mind either to undertake or direct the navigation of the menaced vessel.

Nothing is so costly as the pursuit of a cure for imaginary ills.