The highest degree of meekness consists in seeing, serving, honoring, and treating amiably, on occasion, those who are not to our taste, and who show themselves unfriendly, ungrateful, and troublesome to us.
–Saint Francis de Sales (1567-1622)
In temptations and trials the progress of a man is measured; in them opportunity for merit and virtue is made more manifest.
–Saint Francis de Sales (1567-1622)
If a person shows a firm and persevering determination to serve God in the manner and place to which His divine majesty calls her, she gives the best proof we can have that she has a true vocation.
–Saint Francis de Sales (1567-1622)
The beginning of all temptation lies in a wavering mind and little trust in God, for as a rudderless ship is driven hither and yon by waves, so a careless and irresolute man is tempted in many ways. Fire tempers iron and temptation steels the just. Often we do not know what we can stand, but temptation shows us what we are. Above all, we must be especially alert against the beginnings of temptation, for the enemy is more easily conquered if he is refused admittance to the mind and is met beyond the threshold when he knocks.
–Saint Francis de Sales (1567-1622)
We should all realize that no matter where or how a man dies, if he is in the state of mortal sin and does not repent, when he could have done so and did not, the Devil tears his soul from his body with such anguish and distress that only a person who has experienced it can appreciate it.
–Saint Francis of Assisi (1181–1226)
To be a servant of God means to be charitable towards one’s neighbors, to have an unshakeable determination in the superior part of your soul to obey the will of God, to trust in God with a very humble humility and simplicity, and to lift oneself up as often as one falls, to endure with all your abjections and to quietly put up with others in their imperfections.
–Saint Francis de Sales (1567-1622)
