IX. Abandoning Loreto was an even harder sacrifice for me than leaving my family that first time in order to follow my vocation. But I had to do it. It was a calling. I knew where I had to go.
3. Holiness is not the luxury of a few. It is everyone's duty: yours and mine.
7. There are some people who, in order not to pray, use as an excuse the fact that life is so hectic that it prevents them from praying. This cannot be. Prayer does not demand that we interrupt our work, but that we continue working as if it were a prayer.
It is not necessary to always be meditating nor to consciously experience the sensation that we are talking to God, no matter how nice this would be. What matters is being with him, living in him, in his will. To love with a pure heart, to love everybody, especially to love the poor, is a twenty-four-hour prayer.
8. Lord, may I not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
Because it is in giving that we receive,
in pardoning that we are pardoned.
9. Prayer is not asking. Prayer is putting oneself in the hands of God, at his disposition, and listening to his voice in the depths of our hearts.
11. Praying the Our Father and living it will lead us toward saintliness. The our Father contains everything: God, ourselves, our neighbors..
19. Our poor do not need your condescending attitude nor your pity. The poor need your love and your kindness.
20. If we worry too much about ourselves, we won't have time for others.
23. I have the feeling that we are in such a hurry that we do not even have time to look at one another and smile.
27. Are we equally sure that none of them feels alone, abandoned, neglected, needing some affection? That, too, is poverty.
29. The important thing is not to do a lot or to do everything. The important thing is to be ready for anything, at all times.
33. True love causes pain. If you really love one another, you will not be able to avoid making sacrifices.
37. What we say does not matter, only what God says to souls through us.
42. When I speak of joy, I do not identify it with loud laughter or with noise. This is not true happiness. Sometimes it hides other things. when I speak of happiness, I refer to an inner and deep peace, which shows itself in our eyes, on our faces, in our attitudes, in our gestures, in our promptness.
49. To better understand those we live with, it is imperative that we understand ourselves first.
50. It was a home where tenderness, understanding, and mutual respect abounded.
Everybody today seems to be in a hurry. No one has any time to give to others: children to their parents, parents to their children, spouses to each other.
52. Love begins by taking care of the closest ones- the ones at home. Let us ask ourselves if we are aware that maybe our husband, our wife, our children, or our parents live isolated from others, do not feel loved enough, even though they may live with us. Do we realize this? Where are the old people today? They are in nursing homes. Why? Because they are not wanted, because they are too much trouble, because...
53. If we were humble, nothing would change us-neither praise nor discouragement. If someone were to criticize us, we would not feel discouraged. If someone were to praise us, we also would not feel proud.
55. Before we judge the poor, we have the duty to look inside ourselves.
65. At the moment of death we will not be judged according to the number of good deeds we have done or by the diplomas we have received in our lifetime. We will be judged according to the love we have put into our work.
75. When suffering comes into our lives, we should accept it with a smile. This is the greatest gift from God: to have the courage to accept everything he gives us and asks of us with a smile.
79. Whoever is dependent on his or her money or worries about it, is truly a poor person. If that person places his or her money at the service of others, then the person becomes rich, very rich indeed.
84. It is very possible that you will find human beings, surely very near you, needing affection and love. Do not deny them these. Show them, above all, that you sincerely recognize that they are human beings, that they are important to you.
91. As far as I am concerned, the greatest suffering is to feel alone, unwanted, unloved. The greatest suffering is also having no one, forgetting what an intimate, truly human relationship is, not knowing what it means to be loved, not having a family or friends.
93. Loneliness was an expression of their poverty, the poverty of seeing themselves abandoned by relatives and friends. The poverty of having no one coming to visit them is the poverty that older people feel the most.
94. To listen to someone who has no one to listen to him is a very beautiful thing.
109. I very often tell the Sisters to approach the poor with joy, knowing that they have plenty of reasons to be sad. They don't need us to confirm their sadness for them.
If our work were just to wash and feed and give medicines to the sick, the center would have closed a long time ago. The most important thing in our centers is the opportunity we are offered to reach souls.
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