However high be your endeavors, unless you renounce and subjugate your own will - unless you forget yourself and all that pertains to yourself - not one step will you advance on the road to perfection.

Let my soul live as if separated from my body.

Strive always to confess your sins with a deep knowledge of your own wretchedness and with clarity and purity.

If you do not learn to deny yourself, you can make no progress in perfection.

For true devotion must issue from the heart, and consist in the truth and substances alone of what is represented by spiritual things; all the rest is affection and attachment proceeding from imperfection; and in order that one may pass to any kind of perfection it is necessary for such desires to be killed.

There is nothing better or morenecessary than love.

It is great wisdom to know how to be silent and to look at neither the remarks, nor the deeds, nor the lives of others.