List of points

You lack strength of character: what insistence on having a hand in everything! You are bent on being the salt of every dish. And — you won't be annoyed if I speak clearly — you have little aptitude for being salt: in particular, you lack its capacity to dissolve and pass unnoticed.

You have too little spirit of sacrifice and too great a spirit of curiosity and ostentation.

Don't waste the opportunity of yielding your own judgment. It's hard…, but how pleasing it is in the eyes of God!

Give thanks, as for a very special favour, for that holy abhorrence you feel for yourself.

You are lukewarm if you carry out lazily and reluctantly those things that have to do with our Lord; if deliberately or 'shrewdly' you look for some way of cutting down your duties; if you think only of yourself and of your comfort; if your conversations are idle and vain; if you do not abhor venial sin; if you act from human motives.

Ah, if you would only resolve to serve God 'seriously', with the same zeal with which you serve your ambition, your vanity, your sensuality!…

Let yours not be a noisy virtue.

For all your learning, for all your fame, your eloquence and power, if you are not humble, you are worth nothing. Cut out, root out that self-complacency which dominates you so completely. — God will help you — and then you will be able to begin working for Christ, in the lowest place in his army of apostles.

After losing those human consolations you have been left with a feeling of loneliness, as if you were suspended by a mere thread over the black emptiness of the abyss. And your cries, your shouts for help seem to be heard by nobody.

You really deserve to be forlorn. Be humble, don't seek yourself don't seek consolation. Love the Cross — to bear it is little — and our Lord will hear your prayer. And calm will be restored to your senses. And your wounded heart will heal. And you will have peace.

Each day, my God, I am less sure of myself and more sure of you!

Your own will, your own judgment: that is what worries you.

Deo omnis gloria. All glory to God. It is an emphatic confession of our nothingness. He, Jesus, is everything. We, without him, are worth nothing: nothing. Our vainglory would be just that: vain glory; it would be sacrilegious robbery. There should be no room for that 'I' anywhere.

Give 'all' the glory to God. 'Squeeze' out each one of your actions with your will aided by grace, so that there remains in them nothing that smacks of human pride, of self-complacency.