However softly we speak, God is near enough to hear us.

True love grows by sacrifice and the more thoroughly the soul rejects natural satisfaction the stronger and more detached its tenderness becomes.

I once heard a spiritual man say that he was not so much astonished at the things done by a soul in mortal sin as at the things not done by it. May God, in his mercy, deliver us from such great evil, for there is nothing in the whole of our lives that so thoroughly deserves to be called evil as this, since it brings endless and eternal evils in its train.

I am really much more afraid of those people who have so great a fear of the devil, than I am of the devil himself.

It will be as well, I think, to explain these locutions of God, and to describe what the soul feels when it receives them.

Prayer is a friendly conversation with the One we know loves us.

While the soul is in mortal sin, nothing can profit it; none of its good works merit an eternal reward, since they do not proceed from God as their first principle, and by Him alone is our virtue real virtue.