Grace is necessary to salvation, free will equally so – but grace in order to give salvation, free will in order to receive it.
Humility in furs is better than pride in tunics.
Love is alone sufficient by itself, it pleases by itself and for it’s own sake. It is itself a merit, and itself it’s own recompense. It seeks neither cause, nor consequences beyond itself. It is its own fruit, its own object and usefulness. I love because I love you, I love that I may love.
Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.
Humility is, of all graces, the chiefest when it does not know itself to be a grace at all.
A saint is not someone who never sins, but one who sins less and less frequently and gets up more and more quickly.
Rest is in Him alone. Man knows no peace in the world; but he has no disturbance when he is with God.
The reason for loving God is God Himself. As to how He is to be loved, there is only one measure: It is immeasurable!
Believe me, for I know, you will find something far greater in the woods than in books. Stones and trees will teach you that which you cannot learn from the masters.
In Him should all our affections center, so that in all things we should seek only to do His will, not to please ourselves.
Righteousness is the natural and essential food of the soul, which can no more be satisfied by earthly treasures than the hunger of the body can be satisfied by air. If you should see a starving man standing with mouth open to the wind, inhaling draughts of air as if in hope of gratifying his hunger, you would think him lunatic. But it is no less foolish to imagine that the soul can be satisfied with worldly things which only inflate it without feeding it.
To them that long for the presence of the living God, the thought of Him is sweetest itself: but there is no satiety, rather an ever-increasing appetite...
Many often err and accomplish little or nothing because they try to become learned rather than to live well.
To have a restful or peaceful life in God is good; to bear a life of pain in patience is better; but to have peace in the midst of pain is the best of all.
O wretched slaves of Mammon, you cannot glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ while you trust in treasures laid up on earth: you cannot taste and see how gracious the Lord is, while you are hungering for gold.
In his greediness, he counts all that he has clutched as nothing in comparison with what is beyond his grasp, and loses all pleasure in his actual possessions by longing after what he has not, yet covets.
And real happiness will come, not in gratifying our desires or in gaining transient pleasures, but in accomplishing God’s will for us: even as we pray every day: “Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.
It is so that these impious ones wander in a circle, longing after something to gratify their yearnings, yet madly rejecting that which alone can bring them to their desired end, not by exhaustion but by attainment.
They wear themselves out in vain travail, without reaching their blessed consummation, because they delight in creatures, not in the Creator.
Change now, O Adam, your wicked words of excuse to the song of endless thanksgiving, and say: “O Lord, the woman whom thou hast given me, gave me of the tree of life; and I have eaten, and its fruit has been sweeter than honey to my mouth, and by it thou hast given me life.
Love is sufficient for itself; it gives pleasure to itself, and for its own sake. It is its own merit and own reward. Love needs no cause beyond itself, nor does it demand fruits; it is its own purpose.