“Understand this clearly: if you know how to give, you must know how to pay back. . .”

The virtue of obedience makes the will supple… It inspires the courage with which to fulfill the most difficult tasks.

If people would do for God what they do for the world, what a great number of Christians would go to Heaven.

We ought to ask the Blessed Virgin, the angels, and the saints to pray for us that we may receive the good God as worthily as it is possible for us to receive him.

If you invoke the Blessed Virgin when you are tempted, she will come at once to your help, and Satan will leave you.

There is nothing so great as the Eucharist. If God had something more precious, He would have given it to us.

The Lord is more anxious to forgive our sins than a woman is to carry her baby out of a burning building.

The first thing about the angels that we ought to imitate, is their consciousness of the Presence of God.

Sin is the assassin of the soul.

The Devil writes down our sins – our Guardian Angel all our merits. Labor that the Guardian Angel’s book may be full, and the Devil’s empty.

When we have been to Holy Communion, the balm of love envelops the soul as the flower envelops the bee.

I thought a time would come when people would rout me out of Ars with sticks, when the Bishop would suspend me, and I should end my days in prison. I see, however, that I am not worthy of such a grace.

Have you been working on Sunday? Have you been buying or selling without necessity in the course of this holy day? Give to the poor some alms which will exceed the profit you have made.

Humility is like a pair of scales: the lower one side falls, the higher rises the other. Let us humble ourselves like the Blessed Virgin and we shall be exalted.

There were two saints in the desert, who had sewed thorns into all their clothes; and we seek for nothing but comfort!

Our body is a vessel of corruption; it is meant for death and for the worms, nothing more! And yet we devote ourselves to satisfying it, rather than to enriching our soul, which is so great that we can conceive nothing greater – no, nothing, nothing!

If you are attached to the things of this earth, you should give alms sufficient to enable you to punish your avarice by depriving yourself of all that is not absolutely necessary for life.