It is not humility to insist on being someone that you are not. It is as much as saying that you know better than God who you are and who you ought to be. How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man's city? How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading somebody else's life? His sanctity will never be yours; you must have the humility to work out your own salvation in a darkness where you are absolutely alone.

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness.

This is the greatest stumbling block in our spiritual discipline, which, in actuality, consists not in getting rid of the self but in realizing the fact that there is no such existence from the first.

Humility sets us free to do what is really good, by showing us our illusions and withdrawing our will from what was only an apparent good.

The only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no shortcuts. Those who imagine that they can discover spiritual gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God's will and his grace.

We love the things we pretend to laugh at.

In the devil's theology, the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong.