May He be for ever praised

Sweetness vs. consolation

meditation and petition:  actual virtuous work.

Source in God.

spiritual sweetness oppress but consolation enlarges heart.

The important thing is not to think much, but to love much; then do whatever most arouses you to love.

For love consists, not in the extent of the our happiness, but in the firmness of our determination to try to please God in everything, and to endeavour, in all possible ways, not to offend him, and to pray him ever to advance the honour and glory of his son and the growth of the catholic church.

thought is not the same thing as understanding.  need to know more.

most of trials and times of unrest come from the fact that we do not understand ourselves.

suspension of the faculties during prayer.

Let us have patience and bear everything for the love of God.

It is necessary to to take proper measures and learn to understand ourselves.

The prayer of quiet.    Two basins of water.

Love God without any motive of self-interest.

not only do they neither ask for consolations nor desire them, but they beg him not to give them to them in this life.

Gradually retiring within themselves.  keep silence since he is near.

The most important and pleasing thing in God's eyes is our remembering his honour and glory 

and forgetting ourselves and our own profit and ease and pleasure.

Little by little, he withdraws from them and in this way becomes more and more his own master.