If you are pleased with what you are, you have stopped already. If you say, "It is enough," you are lost. Keep on walking, moving forward, trying for the goal.
A temptation arises: it is the wind. It disturbs you: it is the surging of the seas. This is the time to awaken Christ and let Him remind you of these words
To be under pressure is inescapable. Pressure takes place through all the world; war, siege, the worries of state. We all know men who grumble under these pressures and complain. They are cowards. They lack splendour. But there is another sort of man who is under the same pressure but does not complain, for it is the friction which polishes him. It is the pressure which refines and makes him noble
What is more insane than to be partakers of the Sacraments of the Lord and not partakers of the words of the Lord? These men truly have to say: "In Thy Name we have eaten and drunk," and they will have to hear: "I do not know you!" (Luke 13:26-27). They eat and drink His Body and Blood in the Sacrament and do not recognize in the Gospel His members spread over the whole world, and for this reason they are not numbered among them at the Judgment.
He who commends the nature of the soul as the supreme good, and condemns the nature of the flesh as evil, at once both carnally desires the soul, and carnally flies the flesh, because he feels thus from human vanity, not from divine truth.
Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new! Late have I loved you! And, behold, you were within me, and I out of myself, and there I searched for you.