List of points

Discretion is not secrecy, nor mystery-making. It is simply naturalness.

Discretion is… refinement of spirit. Do you not feel annoyed, uncomfortable deep down inside, when intimate and everyday details of your family life emerge from the warmth of the home to the indifference or curiosity of the public gaze?

Be slow to reveal the intimate details of your apostolate: don't you see that the world in its selfishness will fail to understand?

Say nothing! Don't forget that your ideal is like a newly-lit flame. A single breath might suffice to quench it in your heart.

The fruitfulness of silence! All the energy I see you waste with those repeated indiscretions is energy taken from the effectiveness of your work.

Be discreet.

If you were more discreet, you would not be troubled by the bad after-taste left by so many of your conversations.

Don't seek to be 'understood'. That lack of understanding is providential: so that your sacrifice may pass unnoticed.

If you keep a check on your tongue, you will work more effectively in your apostolic undertakings — so many people let their 'strength' slip through their mouths! — and you will avoid many dangers of vainglory.

Results! Always looking for 'results'! You ask me for photographs, for facts and figures.

I won't send you what you ask, because (though I respect the opposite opinion), I would then think I had acted with a view to making good on earth, and where I want to make good is in heaven.

There are many people, holy people, who don't understand your way. Don't insist on making them understand: you would be wasting your time and you would give rise to indiscretions.

Discretion, virtue of the few. Who slandered women by saying that discretion is not a woman's virtue?

There are many men — yes, full-grown men — who have yet to learn!

What an example of discretion is given us by the Mother of God! Not even to Saint Joseph does she communicate the mystery.

Ask our Lady for the discretion you lack.