Discouragement is simply the despair of wounded self-love.

God felt, God tasted and enjoyed is indeed God, but God with those gifts which flatter the soul, God in darkness, in privation, in forsakenness, in sensibility, is so much God, that he is so to speak God bare and alone. Shall we fear this death, which is to produce in us the true divine life of grace?

This poor world, the object of so much insane attachment, we are about to leave; it is but misery, vanity, and folly; a phantom--the very fashion of which "passeth away.

If the crowns of all the kingdoms of the empire were laid down at my feet in exchange for my books and my love of reading I would spurn them all.

All wars are civil ones; for it is still man spilling his own blood, tearing out his own bowels.

There were some who said that a man at the point of death was more free than all others, because death breaks every bond, and over the dead the united world has no power.

The gifts of God are not to be rejected on account of the channel that brings them.