List of points

You are not happy because you make everything revolve around yourself as if you were always the centre: you have a stomach-ache, or you are tired, or they have said this or that…

—Have you ever tried thinking about Him, and through Him, about others?

It really did hurt you deeply when you were told that what you were looking for was not your conversion, but a coffer for your miseries. In that way you would be able to carry on comfortably — but with a taste of bitter aloes — bearing that sorry load.

Only the stupid are obstinate: the very stupid are very obstinate.

Pull self-love out by the roots and plant in its place love for Jesus Christ. That is the secret of effectiveness and happiness.

Although you say you follow Him, in one way or another you always make sure that it is “you” who do things, according to “your” plans, relying on “your” strength alone. —But the Lord said: Sine Me nihil! — without Me you can do nothing.

They ignored what you call your “rights”, which I translated for you as your “right to be proud”. What a grotesque figure you cut. Because your attacker was powerful you could not defend yourself and you felt the pain of a hundred blows. And despite it all, you have not learned to humble yourself.

Now your conscience accuses you, calling you proud… and cowardly. —Give thanks to God because you are beginning to catch a glimpse of your “duty to be humble”.

All the time it is you, you, you. —And you will never be effective until it is him, him, him, so that you act in nomine Domini — in the name and with the strength of God.

How can you pretend to follow Christ, if you only revolve around yourself?

An impatient and disordered anxiousness to climb up the professional ladder can mask self-love under the appearances of “serving souls”. It is a lie — and I really mean that — when we seek to justify our actions by saying that we must not miss certain opportunities, certain favourable chances.

Turn your eyes back to Jesus; he is “the Way”. During his hidden years, there were also “very favourable” chances to advance his public life — when he was twelve years old, for instance, and the doctors of the law were in amazement at his questions and at the answers he gave. But Jesus Christ fulfils the Will of his Father, and he waits. He obeys!

—Do not lose that holy ambition of yours to lead the whole world to God, but when those ideas present themselves (they might show perhaps a desire to desert) remember that you too have to be obedient and work away at that obscure job, which does not seem at all brilliant, for as long as God asks nothing else of you. He has his own times and paths.

Those who enjoy privilege thanks to money, ancestry, rank, position or intelligence… and abuse it by humiliating those who are less fortunate, show that they are fatuous and proud.

Pride sooner or later ends up humiliating a man in front of others, however much of “a man” he is, since he will have been acting like a vain and brainless puppet, moved by satan’s strings.

Through presumption or simply through vanity, many people run a black market to raise their own personal worth artificially.

Do not be disheartened when you become aware of your mistakes. React against them.

—Sterility is not so much a consequence of one’s faults, especially if one repents, as a consequence of pride.

If you fall, get up with greater hope… Self-love alone is incapable of understanding that an error, when put right, helps us to know and to humble ourselves.

“We are no use.” —A pessimistic and false statement. —If we want to, with the help of God, which is the first and fundamental requirement, we can become useful, as a good instrument, for many enterprises.

It made me think when I heard that hard but true saying from a man of God, when he observed the haughtiness of a miserable creature: “He wears the same skin as the devil — pride.”

And there came to my mind, in contrast, a sincere desire to wrap myself in the virtue taught by Jesus Christ when he said, Quia mitis sum et humilis corde — I am meek and humble of heart. It was the virtue which attracted the gaze of the Most Holy Trinity to his Mother and our Mother: the humility of knowing and having the feeling that we are nothing.