“Learn everything. Later you will see that nothing is superfluous.”

“Therefore I beg you, reader, not to rejoice too greatly if you have read much, but if you have understood much. Nor that you have understood much, but that you have been able to retain it. Otherwise it is of little profit either to read or to understand.”

“It is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be possible to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant's hut, and I know too how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesides and panelled halls.”

“There are those who wish to read everything. Do not try to do this. Let it> alone. The number of books is infinite, and you cannot follow> infinity...For where there is no end, there can be no rest; where there is> no rest, there can be no peace; and where there is no peace, God cannot> dwell.”

“Let nothing perturb you, nothing frighten you. All things pass. God does not change. Patience achieves everything.”

“Act as if everything depended on you; trust as if everything depended on God.”

“We can only learn to know ourselves and do what we can - namely, surrender our will and fulfill God's will in us.”