List of points

Make sure that your lips, the lips of a Christian — for that is what you are and should be at all times — speak those compelling supernatural words which will move and encourage, and will show your committed attitude to life.

Coepit facere et docere — Jesus began to do and then to teach. You and I have to bear witness with our example, because we cannot live a double life. We cannot preach what we do not practise. In other words, we have to teach what we are at least struggling to put into practice.

You are very demanding. You want everyone else, including those who work in the public service, to carry out their obligations. “It is their duty!” you say. Have you then ever thought about whether you respect the timetable of your work and do it conscientiously?

Sincere devotion, true love of God, leads us to work, to fulfil the duty of each day, even though it is far from easy.

People have often drawn attention to the danger of deeds performed without any interior life to inspire them; but we should also stress the danger of an interior life — if such a thing is possible — without deeds.

The interior struggle doesn’t take us away from our temporal business — it makes us finish it off better!

Your life cannot be the repetition of actions which are all the same, because the next one should be more upright, more effective, more full of love than the last. Each day should mean new light, new enthusiasm — for Him!

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.