List of points

Renew each day the effective desire to empty yourself, to deny yourself, to forget yourself, to walk in novitate sensus, with a new life, exchanging this misery of ours for all the hidden and eternal grandeur of God.

If you are fatuous, if all you can think of is your own personal comfort, if you centre everyone else and even the world itself on yourself, then you have no right to call yourself a Christian or to consider yourself a disciple of Christ. He set the level of what can be demanded of us when he offered, for each of us: et animam suam, his own soul, his whole life.

May you know how to put yourself out cheerfully, discreetly and generously each day, serving others and making their lives more pleasant.

—To act in this way is the true charity of Jesus Christ.

Lord, grant me the grace to give up everything that has to do with myself. I should have no other concern than your Glory… in other words, your Love. — Everything for Love!

Our humiliation, our self-effacement, our disappearing and passing unnoticed, should be complete, entire, total.

A resolution: unless I really have to, never to speak of my personal affairs.

Listen to me, my child: you must be happy when people treat you badly and dishonour you, when many come out against you excitedly and it becomes the done thing to spit on you, because you are omnium peripsema, like the refuse of the world.

—It’s hard, it’s very hard. It is hard, until at last a man goes to the Tabernacle, seeing himself thought of as the scum of the earth, like a wretched worm, and says with all his heart “Lord, if you don’t need my good name, what do I want it for?”

Up to then even that son of God does not know what happiness is — up to that point of nakedness and self-giving, which is a self-giving of love, but founded on mortification, on sorrow.

Use this prescription for your life: “I don’t remember that I exist . I don’t think of my own affairs, because there is no time left.”

—Work and service!

A clear sign that you are seeking holiness is — allow me to use the expression — ‘the healthy psychological prejudice’ of thinking habitually about others, while forgetting yourself, so as to bring them closer to God.

When you really trample on your own self and live for others, then you will become a good instrument in God’s hands.

He called — and is calling — his disciples, commanding them ut eatis! — “Go and seek all men.”

If you really want to attain eternal life and honour, you must learn in many cases to put aside your own noble ambitions.

Don’t lay so much stress on ‘my health’, ‘my family name’, ‘my career’, ‘my job’, or ‘my next step’… How annoying this can be! It would seem you have forgotten that you don’t have anything, that everything is His.

When sometimes — perhaps without reason — you feel humiliated; when you think your opinion should prevail; when you notice that at every moment your “self” keeps cropping up: your things, your things, your things… convince yourself that you are killing time, and that what you need is someone to kill your selfishness.