List of points

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

When you hear your success being applauded, let there also sound in your ears the laughter you provoked with your failures.

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.

Get rid of those proud thoughts: you are but the brush in the hand of the artist. And nothing more.

Tell me: of what use is a brush, if it won't let the painter do his work?

If you wish to be humble — you, who are so empty and self-satisfied — just consider these words of Isaias: you are 'a drop of water or dew that falls on the ground and is scarcely seen.'

Gold, silver, jewels: dust, heaps of manure. Gratification, sensual pleasures, satisfaction of the appetites: like a beast, like a mule, like a cock, like a pig, like a bull.

Honours, distinctions, titles: things of air, puffs of pride, lies, nothingness.

Do you hear? Somewhere else, in another state, in another position, you would do much more good. Talent isn't needed to do what you are doing.

Listen to me: wherever you have been placed you please God,… and what you have just been thinking is clearly a suggestion from the devil.

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.

To aspire to positions in any apostolic undertaking is a useless thing in this life, and a danger for the next.

If it's what God wants, you will be called. And then you ought to accept. But don't forget that wherever you are you can and you must become a saint, for that is why you are there.