QUOTATION: Self-Knowledge

If we knew ourselves well, rather than being flabbergasted to find ourselves on the ground, we would wonder how we manage to remain standing.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: The Past and the Future

My past no longer concerns me. It belongs to Divine mercy. My future does not yet concern me. It belongs to Divine providence. What concerns me and what challenges me is today, which belongs to God’s grace and to the devotion of my heart and my good will.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: When You Decide to Become a Serious Christian...

As soon as the children of this world perceive that you desire to follow a devout life they will shoot at you a thousand arrows of mockery and detraction. The most malicious will calumniate your change as being hypocrisy, bigotry, and artifice. They will say that the world has frowned on you and that being rejected by it you turned to God. Your friends will make a world of objections which they imagine to be very wise and charitable. They will tell you that you will fall into a melancholy state of mind; that you will lose credit in the world; that will you will make yourself insupportable; that you will grow old before your time; that your domestic affairs will suffer; that you must live in the world like one in the world; that salvation may be had without so many mysteries; and a thousand similar trivialities. 

My Philothea, all this is nothing but foolish and empty babbling. These people are not interested in your health or in your welfare. “If you had been of the world,” says the Savior, “the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, therefore the world hateth you.” We have seen gentlemen and ladies pass the whole night, even many nights, together at chess or cards. Is there any concentration more absurd, stupid, or gloomy, than that of gamesters? Yet worldly people do not say a word, nor do their friends ever trouble themselves about them. Should we spend an hour in meditation, or rise in the morning a little earlier than usual in order to prepare ourselves for Communion, every one runs for a physician to cure us of our hypochondria and jaundice. Such persons can pass thirty nights in dancing without experiencing any inconvenience; but if they watch a single Christmas night, every one of them coughs and complains that he is sick the next morning. Who does not see that the world is an unjust judge, gracious and favorable to its own children, but harsh and rigorous toward the children of God?

--St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life.

QUOTATION: The World Won't Let You Win

It is true, Philothea, that if we consent to laugh, play, or dance with the world in order to be agreeable, the world will be scandalized at us. If we do not, it will accuse us of hypocrisy or melancholy. If we dress well, the world will attribute it to some design; if we neglect our dress, it will impute it to meanness of heart. Our good humour will be termed a dissoluteness and our mortification sullenness. The world thus looks upon us with an evil eye, and we can never be agreeable to it. It exaggerates our imperfections and proclaims that they are sins, turns our venial sins into mortal and our sins of weakness into sins of malice.

--St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life

QUOTATION: Focus on the Here and Now

The average fault among those who have a good will is that they wish to be something they cannot be, and do not wish to be what they necessarily must be. They conceive desires to do great things for which, perhaps, no opportunity may ever come to them, and meantime neglect the small which the Lord puts into their hands.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Perfection

We can never attain to perfection while we have an affection for any imperfection.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Eucharistic Adoration

When you come before the Lord, talk to him if you can. If you can’t, just stay there, let yourself be seen. Don’t try too hard to do anything else.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Obedience Training

If you would acquire a ready obedience to superiors, accustom yourself to yield to your equals, giving way to their opinions where nothing wrong is involved, without arguing or peevishness; and adapt yourself easily to the wishes of your inferiors as far as you reasonably can, and avoid the exercise of stern authority so long as they do well.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Think of What God Has Done for You

Assuredly, nothing so tends to humble us before the compassion of God as the multitude of His gifts to us; just as nothing so tends to humble us before His justice as the multitude of our misdeeds. Let us consider what He has done for us, and what we have done contrary to His will, and as we review our sins in detail, so let us review His grace in the same.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Poison

 There is a wide difference between having poison and being poisoned. A Christian who uses material things with the spirit of detachment would not be harmed by the possession of wealth.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Ecumenical Councils

In Ecumenical Councils there are many lively debates and a profound search for the truth through reasoning, theological argument and council interventions; however once a subject has been debated, it is up to the Council Fathers – that is, the Bishops and especially the Pope who is the Chief of the Bishops – to decide, to reach a conclusion, to determine the mind of the Council. Once their determination has been made, everyone should acquiesce in it and accept it, not because of the arguments that were advanced in favor of the final determination, or the research that preceded it, but rather because of the authority of the Holy Spirit. Invisibly presiding at Ecumenical Councils, the Holy Spirit it is who really judges and determines by means of the mouths of His servants who have been established by Him as the Pastors of Christendom. All the reasoning, theological argument and council interventions are made, as it were, in front of the Church; while the actual decisions and determinations of the Council Fathers are made in the sanctuary, where the Holy Spirit does speak through the mouths of the visible heads of the local churches, just as Jesus Christ promised.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Preaching Against Heretics

I have always said that whoever preaches with love is preaching effectively against the heretics, even though he does not say a single controversial word against them.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Martyrdom

How foolish are those who waste time in desiring to be martyred in far countries, but do not apply themselves in their state of life.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Virtue

Everyone argues in favor of the virtue he practices easily, and exaggerates the difficulties of the virtues that are contrary to it.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Humility

Humility repulses Satan and preserves us in the gifts and graces of the Holy Spirit. For this reason all the saints, and especially the King of Saints and His Mother, ever honored and cherished this virtue above all others.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Truth in Love

Cook the Truth in Charity until it is sweet.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Salvation

Salvation is shown to faith, it is prepared for hope, but it is given only to charity. Faith points out the way to the land of promise as a pillar of fire, hope feeds us with its manna of sweetness, but charity actually introduces us to the Promised Land.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Desire Nothing, Refuse Nothing

Engrave then on your memory these two precious maxims, which I have already so often recommended to you: Desire nothing, refuse nothing. Look upon the little Jesus in the crib; He receives poverty, nakedness, the society of beasts, the inclemency of the weather, and all that His Father permits to happen to Him. It is not written that He ever reached out His hands to be lifted up into the bosom of His Mother. He abandoned Himself entirely to her care and her foresight. He did not refuse the little comforts she gave Him, and received the services of St. Joseph, the adorations and presents of the shepherds and the kings, all with a holy equanimity. We ought to act in like manner, and, after the example of Our Divine Saviour, neither ask any thing nor refuse any thing, but be equally willing to suffer and to receive whatever the Providence of God may permit to befall us.

--St. Francis de Sales, Consoling Thoughts

QUOTATION: Submission

Our Lord, when on the cross, showed us how to mortify those sentiments of nature which make us too tender about ourselves; for, being very thirsty, He did not ask a drink, but only manifested His want saying : "I thirst." After that He made an act of the greatest submission; for one of those present offering Him a sponge steeped in vinegar on the end of a lance, He tasted it with His blessed lips.

A strange thing! He was not ignorant that such a beverage would increase His anguish; nevertheless, He took it without a word, to teach us with what submission we should receive what is presented to us in sickness, without manifesting our repugnance or our disgust.

--St. Francis de Sales, Consoling Thoughts

QUOTATION: Serving God According to His Will

But now for the truth: we always wish to serve God in our own way, not in His; according to our own will, not according to His; and we love His will when it is comformable to ours, instead of loving ours only when and inasmuch as it is conformable to His.

When He wishes us to be sick, we wish to be well. When He desires us to serve Him by suffering, we desire to serve Him by action. When He wishes us to practice patience, we wish to practice humility, devotion, prayer, or some other virtue, not because it is more to His liking, but more to ours. We love virtue accompanied with sweet sauce, not when accompanied with vinegar and gall. Calvary does not agree so well with us as Thabor; it is not on the former mountain, but on the latter, we would wish to build our tabernacles.

In a word, we prefer health to sickness, and we do not love God the same in health and in sickness. We love Him better when He caresses us than when He strikes us, and thus we change, and, instead of loving the love of God, we love the sweetness of His love; for he who loves only God, loves Him equally at all times, in sickness and in health, in prosperity and in adversity, in suffering and in joy. God being always the same, the variation of our love towards Him cannot but proceed from something out of Him.

--St. Francis de Sales, Consoling Thoughts