List of points

If you are a good son of God, in the same way that a little child needs to be assured of the presence of his parents when he gets up in the morning or goes to bed at night, your first and last thought each day will be for Him.

With your life of piety you will learn how to practise the virtues proper to your condition as a son of God, as a Christian.

—And together with those virtues you will acquire a whole range of spiritual values which seem small but are really very great. They are like shining precious stones, and we must gather them along the way and then take them up to the foot of God’s Throne in the service of our fellow men: simplicity, cheerfulness, loyalty, peace, small renunciations, services which pass unnoticed, the faithful fulfilment of duty, kindness…

I refer everything to you, my God. Without you — who are my Father — what would become of me?

The system, the method, the procedure, the only way to have a life abundant and fertile in supernatural fruits, is to follow the Holy Spirit’s advice, which comes to us via the Acts of the Apostles: omnes erant perseverantes unanimiter in oratione — all these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer.

—Nothing can be done without prayer!

Prayer is the most powerful weapon a Christian has. Prayer makes us effective. Prayer makes us happy. Prayer gives us all the strength we need to fulfil God’s commands.

—Yes!, your whole life can and should be prayer.

The spirit of prayer which fills the entire life of Jesus Christ among men teaches us that all our actions — great or small — ought to be preceded by prayer, accompanied by prayer and followed by prayer.

Every single day, do what you can to know God better, to get acquainted with him, to fall more in love with him each moment, and to think of nothing but of his Love and his glory.

You will carry out this plan, my child, if you never, for any reason whatever, give up your times of prayer, your presence of God, with the aspirations and spiritual communions that set you on fire, your unhurried Holy Mass, and your work, finished off well for him.

I will never share the opinion — though I respect it — of those who separate prayer from active life, as if they were incompatible.

We children of God have to be contemplatives: people who, in the midst of the din of the throng, know how to find silence of soul in a lasting conversation with Our Lord, people who know how to look at him as they look at a Father, as they look at a Friend, whom they love madly.

Those who are pious, with a piety devoid of affectation, carry out their professional duty perfectly, since they know that their work is a prayer raised to God.

Our being children of God, I insist, leads us to have a contemplative spirit in the midst of all human activities; to be light, salt and leaven through our prayer, through our mortification, through our knowledge of religion and of our profession. We will carry out this aim: the more within the world we are, the more we must be God’s.

Good gold and diamonds lie far down in the depths of the earth, not within everyone’s reach.

Your task of holiness — your holiness and that of others — depends on your fervour, your cheerfulness, your everyday, obscure, normal, ordinary work.

In our ordinary behaviour we need a power far greater than that of the legendary King Midas, who changed all he touched to gold.

—We have to change, through love, the human work of our usual working day into the work of God: something that will last for ever.