10 Quotes by Juan de la Cruz

No matter how much individuals do through their own efforts, they cannot actively purify themselves enough to be disposed in the least degree for the divine union of the perfection of love. God must take over and purge them in that fire that is dark for them, as we will explain.

Many beginners also at times possess great spiritual avarice. They hardly ever seem content with the spirit God gives them. They become unhappy and peevish because they don't find the consolation they want in spiritual things. Many never have enough of hearing counsels, or learning spiritual maxims, or keeping them and reading books about them. They spend more time in these than in striving after mortification and the perfection of the interior poverty to which they are obliged.

For God is so desirous that the government and direction of every man should be undertaken by another man like himself, and that every man should be ruled and governed by natural reason, that He earnestly desires us not to give entire credence to the things that He communicates to us supernaturally, nor to consider them as being securely and completely confirmed until they pass through this human aqueduct of the mouth of man.

They can be like the sun, words. They can do for the heart what light can for a field.

Well and good if all things change, O Lord God, provided I am rooted in You.

Seek in reading and you will find in meditation; knock in prayer and it will be opened to you in contemplation.

In giving us his Son, his only and definitive word, God spoke everything to us at once in this sole word, and he has no more to say.

The way in which they are to conduct themselves in this night of sense is to devote themselves not at all to reasoning and meditation, since this is not the time for it, but to allow the soul to remain in peace and quietness, although it may seem clear to them that they are doing nothing and are wasting their time, and although it may appear to them that it is because of their weakness that they have no desire in that state to think of anything. The.

Yea, if a man possess all things he cannot be content, – the greater his possessions the less will be his contentment, for the heart cannot be satisfied with possessions, but rather in detachment from all things and in poverty of spirit.