Alphonsus Liguori
Acquire the habit of speaking to God as if you were alone with Him, familiarly and with confidence and love, as to the dearest and most loving of friends.Collection: Alone
Ask those who love Him with a sincere love, and they will tell you that they find no greater or prompter relief amid the troubles of their life than in loving conversation with their Divine Friend.Collection: Faith
Your God is ever beside you - indeed, He is even within you.Collection: God
Since His delights are to be with you, let yours be found in Him.Collection: God
Assuredly, Loving Souls, you should go to God with all humility and respect, humbling yourselves in His presence, especially when you remember your past ingratitude and sins.Collection: Respect
Just as a mother finds pleasure in taking her little child on her lap, there to feed and caress him, in like manner our loving God shows His fondness for His beloved souls who have given themselves entirely to Him and have placed all their hope in His goodness.Collection: Mom
Speak to Him often of your business, your plans, your troubles, your fears - of everything that concerns you.
If you wish to strengthen your confidence in God still more, often recall the loving way in which He has acted toward you, and how mercifully He has tried to bring you out of your sinful life, to break your attachment to the things of earth and draw you to His love.
With such thoughts in your mind, now that you have resolved to love Him and please Him with all your strength, your only fear should be to fear God too much and to place too little confidence in Him.
The heart of man is, so to speak, the paradise of God.
It is a great mistake, as we have already remarked, to be afraid of Him and to act in His presence like a timid and craven slave trembling with fright before his master.
But You never reject a repentant and humble heart.
God is displeased at the diffidence of souls who love Him sincerely and whom He Himself loves.
Job was astonished at seeing Almighty God so intent on doing good to us that He seems to have nothing more at heart than to love us and to induce us to love Him in return.
Not only is there no need of an intermediary through whom He would want you to speak to Him, but He finds His delight in having you treat with Him personally and in all confidence.
Nothing else is required than to act toward God, in the midst of your occupations, as you do, even when busy, toward those who love you and whom you love.
True, He is infinite Majesty, but He is also infinite Goodness and infinite Love. There can be no greater Lord than God; neither can there be a more ardent lover than He.
What grieves me most in my past offenses, O my loving God, is not so much the punishment I have deserved, as the displeasure I have given You, Who are worthy of infinite love.
Who is there that ever receives a gift and tries to make bargains about it? Let us, then, return thanks for what He has bestowed on us. Who can tell whether, if we had had a larger share of ability or stronger health, we should not have possessed them to our destruction.
Yet you should practice the greatest possible love and confidence in treating with Him.
He who trusts himself is lost. He who trusts in God can do all things.Collection: Saint
The past is no longer yours; the future is not yet in your power. You have only the present wherein to do good.Collection: Past
Acquire the habit of speaking to God as if you were alone with Him, familiarly and with confidence and love, as to the dearest and most loving of friends. Speak to Him often of your business, your plans, your troubles, your fears - of everything that concerns you. Converse with Him confidently and frankly; for God is not wont to speak to a soul that does not speak to Him.Collection: Soul
Know also that you will probably gain more by praying fifteen minutes before the Blessed Sacrament than by all the other spiritual exercises of the day. True, Our Lord hears our prayers anywhere, for He has made the promise, 'Ask, and you shall receive,' but He has revealed to His servants that those who visit Him in the Blessed Sacrament will obtain a more abundant measure of grace.Collection: Faith
Whoever prays is certainly saved. He who does not is certainly damned. All the blessed have been saved by prayer. All the damned have been lost through not praying. If they had prayed they would not have been lost. And this is, and will be their greatest torment in hell: to think how easily they might have been saved, just by asking God for His grace, but that now it is too late - their time of prayer is gone.Collection: Prayer
Were you to ask what are the means of overcoming temptations, I would answer: The first means is prayer; the second is prayer; the third is prayer; and you should you ask me a thousand times, I would repeat the same.Collection: Prayer
Those who say the Rosary daily and wear the Brown Scapular and who do a little more, will go straight to Heaven.Collection: Christian
When we see a beautiful object, a beautiful garden, or a beautiful flower, let us think that there we behold a ray of the infinite beauty of God, who has given existence to that object.Collection: Beautiful
There is a practice that is most powerful in keeping us united with God. That practice is the constant recollection of His presence.Collection: Powerful
He who desires nothing but God is rich and happy.Collection: Desire
Devil does not bring sinners to Hell with their eyes open: he first blinds them with the malice of their own sins. He thus leads them to eternal perdition. Before we fall into sin, the enemy labours to blind us, that we may not see the evil we do, and the ruin we bring upon ourselves by offending God. After we commit sin, he seeks to make us dumb, that, through shame, we may conceal our guilt in confession.Collection: Fall
There is no one, after God, who loves us as much as this most loving Mother does.Collection: Mother
After the love which we owe Jesus Christ, we must give the chief place in our heart to the love of His Mother Mary.Collection: Mother
Good friends find pleasure in one another's company. Let us know pleasure in the company of our best Friend, a Friend who can do everything for us, a friend who loves us beyond measure. Here in the Blessed Sacrament we can talk to him straight from the heart. We can open our souls to him, tell him what we need, beg him for powerful graces. We are perfectly free to approach the King of the universe with full confidence and without fear.Collection: Kings
There is nothing more pleasing to God, than to see a soul who patiently and serenely bears whatever crosses it is sent; this is how love is made, by putting lover and loved one on the same level. . . A soul who loves Jesus Christ desires to be treated the way Christ was treated-desires to be poor, despised and humiliated.Collection: Jesus
Let us thank God for having called us to His holy faith. It is a great gift, and the number of those who thank God for it is small.Collection: Numbers
It is almost certain that excess in eating is the cause of almost all the diseases of the body, but its effects on the soul are even more disastrous.Collection: Soul
If you embrace all things in this life as coming from the hands of God, and even embrace death to fulfill His holy will, assuredly you will die a saint.Collection: Hands
He who wishes to find Jesus should seek Him, not in the delights and pleasures of the world, but in mortification of the senses.Collection: Jesus
He who embraces the cross and bears it with patience lightens the weight of the cross. Indeed, the weight itself becomes a consolation; for God abounds with grace to all those who carry the cross with good will in order to please him.Collection: Order
When we have to reply to anyone who has insulted us, we should be careful to do it always with gentleness. A soft answer extinguishes the fire of wrath.Collection: Fire
Let your constant practice be to offer yourself to God, that He may do with you what He pleases.Collection: Practice
St. Jerome declares that he holds for certain, and has learned from experience, that he will never make a good end who has led a bad life to the very last: 'This I hold, this I have learned by much experience, that his will be an evil end who has always led an evil life.'Collection: Evil
The sovereigns of the earth do not always grant audience readily; on the contrary, the King of Heaven, hidden under the eucharistic veils, is ready to receive anyone.Collection: Kings
It would be the greatest delight of the seraphs to pile up sand on the seashore or to pull weeds in a garden for all eternity, if they found out such was God's will. Our Lord himself teaches us to ask to do the will of God on earth as the saints do it in heaven: "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."Collection: Weed
Obedience to a confessor is the most acceptable offering which we can make to God, and the most secure way of doing the divine will.Collection: Offering
The principal means of acquiring an ardent love of Christ are mental prayer, Communion, mortification, retirement.Collection: Retirement
"The flowers have appeared in our land: the time of pruning is come: the voice of the turtle-dove is heard in our land." When the soul, like the solitary turtle-dove, retires and recollects itself in meditation to converse with God, then the flowers, that is, good desires, appear; then comes the time of pruning, that is, the correction of faults that are discovered in mental prayer.Collection: Prayer
My Jesus! What a lovable contrivance this holy Sacrament was - that You would hide under the appearance of bread to make Yourself loved and to be available for a visit by anyone who desires You!Collection: Jesus
A person may be Baptized, and yet not born again to grace, in consequence of not having the necessary dispositions at Baptism.Collection: Grace