Johannes Tauler

“Your meditations may be as profound, as exalted, as devout as you like; you may practise every pious exercise you can manage, but all this is as nothing in comparison with the Blessed Sacrament. What we do may be godly, but this sacrament is God Himself!”

“You have within you many strong and cruel enemies to overcome. You must know that there are still a thousand ties which you must break. No one can tell you what they are; only you can tell by looking at yourself and into your heart.”

“In the kingdom of heaven it is His work that will be crowned, not yours. Anything in you that He has not wrought Himself will count for nothing.”

“Never believe that true prayer consists in mere babbling, reciting so many psalms and vigils, saying your beads while you allow your thoughts to roam.”

“Judge yourself; if you do that you will not be judged by God, as St. Paul says. But it must be a real sense of your own sinfulness, not an artificial humility.”

“The gracious, eternal God permits the spirit to green and bloom and to bring forth the most marvelous fruit, surpassing anything a tongue can express and a heart conceive.”

“God touches and moves, warns and desires all equally, and He wants one quite as much as another. The inequality lies in the way in which His touch, His warnings, and His gifts are received.”

“To discern what weaknesses and faults separate you from God, you must enter into your own inward ground and then confront yourself.”

“Every one should find some suitable time, day or night, to sink into his depths, each according to his own fashion. Not every one is able to engage in contemplative prayer.”

“Man must do his part and detach himself from created things.”

“Let God and all his creation teach you what your sins are.”

“Often when He comes, He finds the soul occupied. Other guests are there, and He has to turn away. He cannot gain entry, for we love and desire other things; therefore, His gifts, which He is offering to everyone unceasingly, must remain outside.”

“Because in the school of the Spirit man learns wisdom through humility, knowledge by forgetting, how to speak by silence, how to live by dying.”

“Like blind hens, we are ignorant of our own self and the depths within us.”

“A good meditation, even when it is interrupted by occasional nodding, is much more beneficial than many outward religious exercises.”

“What matters most is a good and ready will to obey God.”

“If you fall seventy times a day, rise seventy times and return to God so that you will not fall too often.”

“God in His wisdom has decided that He will reward no works but His own.”

“You don't have to leave the world to be holy and grow closer to the Holy One.”

“Spiritually good people, pure in heart, who long for the Blessed Sacrament but cannot receive at the time, can receive spiritually... even a hundred times a day, in sickness and in health, with immeasurable grace and profit.”