What do you possess if you possess not God?
O Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet.
There is something in humility which strangely exalts the heart.
What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.
Never judge a philosophy by its abuse.
If you understood him, it would not be God.
Such is the strength of the burden of habit. Here I have the power to be but do not wish it. There I wish to be but lacks the power. On both grounds, I’m in misery.
He who commends the nature of the soul as the supreme good, and condemns the nature of the flesh as evil, at once both carnally desires the soul, and carnally flies the flesh, because he feels thus from human vanity, not from divine truth.
I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are wise and very beautiful; but I have never read in either of them: Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden.
You are my Lord, because You have no need of my goodness.
Do you wish to be great? Then begin by being. Do you desire to construct a vast and lofty fabric? Think first about the foundations of humility. The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation.
Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.
God is more truly imagined than expressed, and He exists more truly than He is imagined.
The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.
Lust indulged became habit, and habit unresisted became necessity.
In all your movements, let nothing be evident that would offend the eyes of another.
This very moment I may, if I desire, become the friend of God.
Love is the beauty of the soul.
There is no remedy so powerful against the heat of concupiscence as the remembrance of our Savior’s Passion. In all my difficulties I never found anything so efficacious as the wounds of Christ: In them I sleep secure; from them I derive new life.
The dove loves when it quarrels; the wolf hates when it flatters.