List of points

You play around with temptations, you put yourself in danger, you fool around with your sight and with your imagination, you chat about… stupidities. And then you are anxious that doubts, scruples, confusion, sadness and discouragement might assail you.

—You must admit that you are not very consistent.

How are you going to live in God’s presence if you are only looking around everywhere? — It is as if you were drunk with novelties and futilities.

“My affairs buzz around in my head at the most inopportune moments…”, you say.

That is why I have recommended you to try to establish some times for interior silence… and to guard your external and internal senses.

If until now, when you had not yet found Him, you wanted to run through life with your eyes wide open, to find out about everything, from this moment onwards you can run with a clear vision, to see with him what is really of abiding interest to you.

Holy Purity is the humility of the flesh! You asked the Lord for seven bolts on your heart. And I advised you to ask for seven bolts for your heart and eighty years of gravity as well, for your youth…

And be watchful, for a spark is much easier to extinguish than a fire. Take flight… for in this it is low cowardice to be “brave”; a roving eye… does not mean a lively spirit, but turns out to be a snare of satan.

Yet human diligence, with mortification, the cilice, disciplines and fasting are all worthless without you, my God!

A young man who had just given himself more fully to God said: “What I need to do now is speak less, visit the sick and sleep on the floor.”

—Apply that to yourself.

Let us not forget that in all human activities there must be men and women who, in their lives and work, raise Christ’s Cross aloft for all to see, as an act of reparation. It is a symbol of peace and of joy, a symbol of the Redemption and of the unity of the human race. It is a symbol of the love that the Most Holy Trinity, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit had, and continues to have, for mankind.