The Spiritual Maxims of St. Francis de Sales

[Denise]

Between death and love there is no alternative.

[Denise]

Love and death are so mingled in the Passion of our Lord that we cannot have the one in our heart without the other.

[Denise]

All is love's, and in love, for love, in holy Church.

Hatred separates us, and love brings us into one.

To live according to the spirit is to love according to the spirit; to live according to the flesh is to love according to the flesh; for love is the life of the soul as the soul is the life of the body.

[Denise]

Love is the movement, effusion and advancement of the heart toward the good.

The affinity which causes loves does not always consist in resemblance, but in the mutual relationship between the lover and the thing loved.

[Denise]

Union in distinction makes order; order produces agreement; and proportion and agreement, in complete and finished things, make beauty.

The union to which loves aspires is spiritual.

[Denise]

Love not finding us equal, equalizes us, not finding us united, unites us.

The end of love is no other thing than the union of the lover and the thing loved.

We cannot help conforming ourselves to what we love.

[Denise]

All is subject to heavenly love, who will either be king or nothing.

To love truly and to cease loving are two incompatible things.

Chaste and holy fear is reverence, a love and respect, free from all that is servile and mercenary.

Love desires secrecy.

[Denise]

You must grown in love by means of the root, rather than the branches.

Love is like fire, which is of clearer and fairer flame as its matter is more delicate.

Love is bittersweet, and while we live in this world it never has a sweetness perfectly sweet, because it is not perfect, nor even purely satisfied.

Love either takes away the hardship of labor, or makes it dear to us while we feel it.

[Denise]

The Holy Ghost teaches that the lips of the Spouse, that is the Church, resemble scarlet and the dropping honeycomb, to let everyone know that all the doctrine she announces consists in sacred love.

Love is the abridgment of all theology.

During this mortal life we must choose eternal love or eternal death, there is no middle choice.

[Denise]

You will never see God without goodness,, nor yourself without misery.

God is our God and man's heart is His home.

God has imprinted on all created things His traces, trail and footsteps.

[Denise]

God is God of the human heart.

What was I when I was not? What was I, who am now being something am yet but a simple and poor worm of the earth?

All that is good in us is not of us.

If we only knew what we were, instead of being astonished at finding ourselves on the ground, we should marvel how we can remain standing up.

[Denise]

The diversity of paths makes no diversity in ourselves.

We cannot quit ourselves while we are here below; we must always bear ourselves until God bears us to Heaven.

The Philistine always dies with us, and always lives with us.

But for holy eternity in which all our days end, we should have cause to blame our human condition.

[Denise]

Natural reason is a good tree which God has planted in us; the fruits which spring from it cannot but be good.

There is no nature, though never so good, which may not be perverted to evil by vicious habits. There is no disposition, though ever so perverse, that may not, by the Grace of God and our own industry, be brought under control or overcome.

Sometimes we so much occupy ourselves with being good angels that we neglect to be good men and women.

[Denise]

On The World

We must make use of this world as though we were making no use of it at all.

We should enjoy spiritual things but only use corporal things.

All the world together is not worth one soul.

Never look at what the world offers without considering what it hides.

[Denise]

Let us consider that all we have makes us nothing more than the rest of the world, and that all this is nothing before God.

In this world there is no wealth without anxiety, no repose without labor, no consolation without affliction, no health without sickness.

In this perishable life, good is never to be found without evil following in its train.