List of points

Don't say: 'That's the way I'm made… it's my character'. It's your lack of character: Be a man.

You persist in being worldly, superficial, scatter-brained, because you are a coward. What is it but cowardice not to want to face yourself?

You are curious and inquisitive, prying and nosey. Are you not ashamed that even in your defects you are not much of a man? Be a man: and instead of poking into other people's lives seek to acquire a true knowledge of your own.

Here is a safe doctrine that I want you to know: one's own mind is a bad adviser, a poor pilot to steer the soul through the storms and tempests and among the reefs of the interior life.

That is why it is the will of God that the command of the ship be entrusted to a Master who, with his light and his knowledge, can guide us to a safe harbour.

You think you are quite important: your studies, your research work, your publications, your social standing, your name, your political activities, the positions you hold, your wealth… your age: you're no longer a child!…

Just because of all that, you, more than others, need a Director for your soul.

Why are you so reluctant to see yourself and to let your Director see you as you really are?

You will have won a great battle if you lose that fear of letting yourself be known.

Give thanks, as for a very special favour, for that holy abhorrence you feel for yourself.

Your greatest enemy is your own self.

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.

Forget that despair produced by the realization of your weakness. — True: financially you are a zero, in social standing another zero, and another in virtues, and another in talent.

But to the left of these noughts, stands Christ. And what an incalculable figure we get!

The more I am exalted, Jesus, the more I want you to humble me in my heart, showing me what I have been, and what I will be if you leave me.

Don't forget that you are a… dust-bin. That's why if by any chance the divine Gardener lays his hands on you, and scrubs and cleans you, and fills you with magnificent flowers, neither the scent nor the colour that embellish your ugliness should make you proud.

Humble yourself: don't you know that you are the rubbish bin?