List of points

Work is man’s original vocation. It is a blessing from God, and those who consider it a punishment are sadly mistaken.

The Lord, who is the best of fathers, placed the first man in Paradise ut operaretur, so that he would work.

To study, to work: these are inescapable duties for all Christians. They are means of defending ourselves from the enemies of the Church and of attracting, with our professional prestige, so many souls who, being good, fight in isolation. They are most fundamental weapons for whoever wants to be an apostle in the middle of the world.

I ask God that you may take as your model Jesus as an adolescent and as a young man, both when he disputed with the doctors in the Temple and when he worked in Joseph’s workshop.

Jesus’ thirty-three years!…: thirty were spent in silence and obscurity; in submission and work…

That big young man wrote to me saying: “My ideal is so great that only the sea could contain it.” I answered: “And what about the Tabernacle, which is so ‘small’; and the ‘common’ workshop of Nazareth?”

—It is in the greatness of ordinary things that He awaits us!

Before God, no occupation is in itself great or small. Everything gains the value of the Love with which it is done.

I was convinced by that priest who is a friend of ours. He was talking about his apostolic work, and he assured me that there are no tasks of little importance. Hidden under this garden covered in roses, he said, is the silent effort of so many souls who with their work and prayer, their prayer and work, have won from Heaven abundant showers of grace, which makes everything fertile.