You have within you many strong and cruel enemies to overcome. You must know that there are still a thousand ties which you must break. No one can tell you what they are; only you can tell by looking at yourself and into your heart.

In the kingdom of heaven it is His work that will be crowned, not yours. Anything in you that He has not wrought Himself will count for nothing.

You don't have to leave the world to be holy and grow closer to the Holy One.

The gracious, eternal God permits the spirit to green and bloom and to bring forth the most marvelous fruit, surpassing anything a tongue can express and a heart conceive.

Judge yourself; if you do that you will not be judged by God, as St. Paul says. But it must be a real sense of your own sinfulness, not an artificial humility.

Commemoration of Katherine of Alexandria, Martyr, 4th century If ye keep watch over your hearts, and listen for the Voice of God and learn of Him, in one short hour ye can learn more from Him than ye could learn from Man in a thousand years.

God touches and moves, warns and desires all equally, and He wants one quite as much as another. The inequality lies in the way in which His touch, His warnings, and His gifts are received.

God in His wisdom has decided that He will reward no works but His own.

Rid yourself of anything that is not directed toward God.

If you fall seventy times a day, rise seventy times and return to God so that you will not fall too often.

Such sins, even if they do not kill all grace in us, do harm, nevertheless; and though they are only venial in themselves, they make us apt, ready, and inclined to lose grace and to fall into mortal sin.

A good meditation, even when it is interrupted by occasional nodding, is much more beneficial than many outward religious exercises.

In prayerful silence you must look into your own heart. No one can tell you better than yourself what comes between you and God. Ask yourself. Then listen!

Your meditations may be as profound, as exalted, as devout as you like; you may practise every pious exercise you can manage, but all this is as nothing in comparison with the Blessed Sacrament. What we do may be godly, but this sacrament is God Himself!

Let God and all his creation teach you what your sins are.

You have within you many strong and cruel enemies to overcome. You must know that there are still a thousand ties which you must break. No one can tell you what they are; only you can tell by looking at yourself and into your heart.

Often when He comes, He finds the soul occupied. Other guests are there, and He has to turn away. He cannot gain entry, for we love and desire other things; therefore, His gifts, which He is offering to everyone unceasingly, must remain outside.

If we really want to achieve true prayer, we must turn our backs upon everything temporal, everything external, everything that is not divine.

Like blind hens, we are ignorant of our own self and the depths within us.

Man must do his part and detach himself from created things.

Give yourself entirely to God, enter and hide in the hidden ground of your soul.

Every one should find some suitable time, day or night, to sink into his depths, each according to his own fashion. Not every one is able to engage in contemplative prayer.

To discern what weaknesses and faults separate you from God, you must enter into your own inward ground and then confront yourself.

Because in the school of the Spirit man learns wisdom through humility, knowledge by forgetting, how to speak by silence, how to live by dying.

Spiritually good people, pure in heart, who long for the Blessed Sacrament but cannot receive at the time, can receive spiritually... even a hundred times a day, in sickness and in health, with immeasurable grace and profit.

As a good wine must be kept in a good cask, so a wholesome body is the proper foundation for a well-appointed inner ground.

In the most intimate, hidden and innermost ground of the soul, God is always essentially, actively, and substantially present. Here the soul possesses everything by grace which God possesses by nature.

Never believe that true prayer consists in mere babbling, reciting so many psalms and vigils, saying your beads while you allow your thoughts to roam.

What matters most is a good and ready will to obey God.

But this is a true saying among men: the gifts of enemies are no gifts and profitless.

The Prophet defeated the enemies of Islam even when he and his followers were small in number.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

There are no enemies in science, professor. Only phenomena to study.

A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Be assured those will be thy worst enemies, not to whom thou hast done evil, but who have done evil to thee. And those will be thy best friends, not to whom thou hast done good, but who have done good to thee.

Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!

Keep your enemies in front of you.

As a matter of self-preservation, a man needs good friends or ardent enemies, for the former instruct him and the latter take him to task.

Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?

Many have had their greatness made for them by their enemies.

It is not enough for me to win. My enemies must lose.

Comforts and syphilis are the greatest enemies of mankind.

I'm just grateful to be on this planet. I have no enemies that I know of. I'm just the guy who makes happy.

Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies.

He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.

We are at war with enemies that still have the intent to do further damage to Americans at home and abroad.

I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don't believe I deserved my friends.

Often we have no time for our friends but all the time in the world for our enemies.