JOHANNES TAULER

To discern what weaknesses and faults separate you from God, you must enter into your own inward ground and then confront yourself.

Spiritually good people, pure in heart, who long for the Blessed Sacrament but cannot receive at the time, can receive spiritually... even a hundred times a day, in sickness and in health, with immeasurable grace and profit.

What matters most is a good and ready will to obey God.

Give yourself entirely to God, enter and hide in the hidden ground of your soul.

You have within you many strong and cruel enemies to overcome. You must know that there are still a thousand ties which you must break. No one can tell you what they are; only you can tell by looking at yourself and into your heart.

Like blind hens, we are ignorant of our own self and the depths within us.

Because in the school of the Spirit man learns wisdom through humility, knowledge by forgetting, how to speak by silence, how to live by dying.

Often when He comes, He finds the soul occupied. Other guests are there, and He has to turn away. He cannot gain entry, for we love and desire other things; therefore, His gifts, which He is offering to everyone unceasingly, must remain outside.

God in His wisdom has decided that He will reward no works but His own.

Rid yourself of anything that is not directed toward God.

Let God and all his creation teach you what your sins are.

Your meditations may be as profound, as exalted, as devout as you like; you may practise every pious exercise you can manage, but all this is as nothing in comparison with the Blessed Sacrament. What we do may be godly, but this sacrament is God Himself!

In the most intimate, hidden and innermost ground of the soul, God is always essentially, actively, and substantially present. Here the soul possesses everything by grace which God possesses by nature.

If you fall seventy times a day, rise seventy times and return to God so that you will not fall too often.

As a good wine must be kept in a good cask, so a wholesome body is the proper foundation for a well-appointed inner ground.

Commemoration of Katherine of Alexandria, Martyr, 4th century If ye keep watch over your hearts, and listen for the Voice of God and learn of Him, in one short hour ye can learn more from Him than ye could learn from Man in a thousand years.

Such sins, even if they do not kill all grace in us, do harm, nevertheless; and though they are only venial in themselves, they make us apt, ready, and inclined to lose grace and to fall into mortal sin.

Judge yourself; if you do that you will not be judged by God, as St. Paul says. But it must be a real sense of your own sinfulness, not an artificial humility.

If we really want to achieve true prayer, we must turn our backs upon everything temporal, everything external, everything that is not divine.

In prayerful silence you must look into your own heart. No one can tell you better than yourself what comes between you and God. Ask yourself. Then listen!

Man must do his part and detach himself from created things.

A good meditation, even when it is interrupted by occasional nodding, is much more beneficial than many outward religious exercises.

You don't have to leave the world to be holy and grow closer to the Holy One.

In the kingdom of heaven it is His work that will be crowned, not yours. Anything in you that He has not wrought Himself will count for nothing.

Never believe that true prayer consists in mere babbling, reciting so many psalms and vigils, saying your beads while you allow your thoughts to roam.