List of points

Why look around if you carry 'your world' within you?

Silence is the door-keeper of the interior life.

A change! You say you need a change!… opening your eyes wide so as to take in better the images of things, or almost closing them because you are short-sighted.

Close them altogether! Have interior life, and you will see, in undreamt-of colour and relief, the wonders of a better world, of a new world: and you will draw close to God…, and know your weakness…, and be deified… with a deification which, by bringing you nearer to your Father, will make you more a brother of your fellow-men.

The plants lay hidden under the snow. And the farmer, the owner of the land, observed with satisfaction: 'Now they are growing on the inside.'

I thought of you: of your forced inactivity…

Tell me: are you too growing 'on the inside'?

Each day try to find a few minutes of that blessed solitude which you so much need to keep your interior life going.

Recollection. Seek God within you and listen to him.

So you are bored? Naturally, if you keep your senses awake and your soul asleep.

Dissipation. — You slake your senses and faculties in whatever pool you meet on the way. And you can feel the results: unsettled purpose, scattered attention, deadened will and quickened concupiscence.

Subject yourself once again to a serious plan that will make you lead a christian life: or you'll never do anything worth while.