How do you love yourself? Is it a love which concerns this life chiefly? Is so, you will desire to abide here forever, and you will diligently seek your worldly establishment - but if the love you bear yourself has a heavenward tendency, you will long or, at all events, you will be ready to go hence whenever it may please our Lord.

It is wonderful how attractive a gentle, pleasant manner is, and how much it wins hearts.

Be patient, you are in good company. Our Lord Himself, our Lady, the apostles, and countless saints, both men and women, have been poor.

For acting thus you will remain innocent among the hissings of the serpents, and like a sweet strawberry you will receive no venom from the contact of venomous tongues.

God's favor floats as it were over all this and finds joy in turning all those miseries to the greater profit of those who love Him. From toil He makes patience spring forth.

Take patiently the petty annoyances, the trifling discomforts, the unimportant losses which come upon all of us daily; for by means of these little matters, lovingly and freely accepted, you will give Him your whole heart, and win His.

Everybody finds themselves sometimes deficient in what they need, and put to inconvenience ... the richest people may easily be without something they want, and that is practically to suffer poverty. Accept such occurrences cheerfully, rejoice in them, bear them willingly.

He enables [his children] to walk before him; he holds their hand in difficulties; he himself carries them along in hardships that he sees as being otherwise unbearable to them.

We must unceasingly ask for [perseverance] by making use of the means which God has taught us for obtaining it: prayer, fasting, almsgiving, frequenting the sacraments, association with good companions, and hearing and reading Holy Scripture.

Oppose vigorously any tendency to sadness ... You must persevere. By means of sorrow the enemy tries to make us weary of good works, but if he sees that we don't give them up and that being done in spite of his opposition they have become very meritorious, he will stop troubling us.