“We will always find fundamentally the compulsion to become what the soul should be.”

An ‘I’ without a body is a possibility. But a body without an ‘I’ is utterly impossible.

My longing for truth was a single prayer.

As for what concerns our relations with our fellow men, the anguish in our neighbor’s soul must break all precept. All that we do is a means to an end, but love is an end in itself, because God is love.

Who can sleep on the night that God became man?

The deeper one is drawn into God, the more one must ‘go out of oneself’; that is, one must go to the world in order to carry the divine life into it.

Those who join the Carmelite Order are not lost to their near and dear ones, but have been won for them, because it is our vocation to intercede to God for everyone.

The motive, principle, and end of the religious life is to make an absolute gift of self to God in a self-forgetting love, to end one’s own life in order to make room for God’s life.

Usually one gets a heavier cross when one attempts to get rid of an old one.

Just take everything exactly as it is, put it in God’s hands and leave it with Him.

Everywhere the need exists for maternal sympathy and help.

Each woman who lives in the light of eternity can fulfill her vocation, no matter if it is in marriage, in a religious order, or in a worldly profession.

Do not accept anything as love which lacks truth.

Woman naturally seeks to embrace that which is living, personal, and whole. To cherish, guard, protect, nourish and advance growth is her natural, maternal yearning.

The woman’s soul is fashioned as a shelter in which other souls may unfold.

Energy apparently increases with the amount of work to be done. When nothing of burning urgency is waiting, it decreases much sooner. Heaven seems to understand such economy.

The Bread that we need each day to grow in eternal life, makes of our will a docile instrument of the Divine Will; sets the Kingdom of God within us; gives us pure lips, and a pure heart with which to glorify his holy name.

Study depends on the goodwill of the student, a quality that cannot be secured by compulsion.

Somewhere between obsession and compulsion is impulse.

In seasons of tumult and discord bad men have most power; mental and moral excellence require peace and quietness.

By punishing men of talent we confirm their authority.

It is a part of the nature of man to resist compulsion.

Even for learned men, love of fame is the last thing to be given up.

The denial of an objective moral law, based on the compulsion to deny the existence of God, results ultimately in the denial of evil itself.

When we experience the power of the Self, there is an absence of fear, there is no compulsion to control, and no struggle for approval or external power.