The Dialogue of Saint Catherine of Siena

the soul always fears until she arrives at true love.

You know that every evil is founded in self-love, and that self-love is a cloud that takes away the light of reason, which reason holds in itself the light of faith, and one is not lost without the other.

Otherwise you fall into contempt of your neighbor, if you judge his evil will towards you, instead of My will acting in him.

The sign that you have this virtue is patience, and impatience the sign that you have it not, and you will find that this is indeed so, when I speak to you further concerning this virtue.

So you see that the eye of the intellect has received supernatural light, infused by grace, by which the doctors and saints knew light in darkness, and of darkness made light.

I had not been able to show, by finite things, because My love was infinite, how much more love I had, I wished you to see the secret of the Heart,

I also wish you to look at the Bridge of My only-begotten Son, and see the greatness thereof, for it reaches from Heaven to earth, that is, that the earth of your humanity is joined to the greatness of the Deity thereby.

The soul is in God and God in the soul, just as the fish is in the sea and the sea in the fish.

say, you are all obliged to help one another by word and doctrine, and the example of good works, and in every other respect in which your neighbor may be seen to be in need; counseling him exactly as you would yourselves,

that the endurance of suffering alone, without desire, was not sufficient to punish a fault.

Penance should be but the means to increase virtue according to the needs of the individual, and according to what the soul sees she can do in the measure of her own possibility.