The Interrior Castle: Favorite Quotes

I have been reading The Interior Castle by Saint Teresa of Avila.  I have found much wisdom and hope in her thoughts and in her words.  Below are fifteen of my favorite quotes from her book that I found extremely comforting and nurturing.  I love how she paints such a clear image of how our love for God must always grow, we need to want more of Him and this desire for Him must lead us further into our interior castle where we will find Him so utterly complete.  Yet, in our journey we have a double mission to love God and love our neighbor – this method of loving is the only way towards complete union with Him.  It’s the greatest commandment and we must always honor it.  Enjoy the quotes:

“Our souls may lose their peace and even disturb other people’s if we are always criticizing trivial actions which often are not real defects at all, but we construe them wrongly through ignorance of their motives.”

“His Majesty is willing to wait for us many a day and even many a year, especially when He sees perseverance and good desires in our hearts.”

“‘Peace, peace be unto you,’ my sisters, as our Lord said, and many a time proclaimed to His Apostles. Believe me, if we neither possess nor strive to obtain this peace at home, we shall never find it abroad.”

“His Majesty knows that I have nothing to rely upon but His mercy; as I cannot cancel the past, I have no other remedy but to flee to Him, and to confide in the merits of His Son and of His Virgin Mother.”

“This love, my daughters, must not be the fabric of our imagination; we must prove it by our works.”

“Let us look at our own faults, and not at other persons’.”

“We cannot stop the revolution of the heavens as they rush with velocity upon their course, neither can we control our imagination. When this wanders we at once imagine that all the powers of the soul follow it; we think everything is lost, and that the time spent in God’s presence is wasted. Meanwhile, the soul is perhaps entirely united to Him in the innermost mansions, while the imagination is in the precincts of the castle, struggling with a thousand wild and venomous creatures and gaining merit by its warfare. Therefore we need not let ourselves be disturbed, nor give up prayer, as the devil is striving to persuade us. As a rule, all our anxieties and troubles come from misunderstanding our own nature.”

“Lord tests her love for Him by the way in which she bears His absence.”

“He enters the innermost depths of our souls without a door, as He entered the room where the disciples sat, saying ‘Pax vobis,’ and as He emerged from the sepulcher without removing the stone that closed the entrance.”

“Our Lord asks but two things of us: love, for Him and for our neighbor: these are what we must strive to obtain. If we practice both these virtues perfectly we shall be doing His will and so shall be united to Him.”

“I think the most certain sign that we keep these two commandments is that we have a genuine love for others. We cannot know whether we love God although there may be strong reasons for thinking so, but there can be no doubt about whether we love our neighbor or no.”

“If she (friend) is in pain, feel for it as if it were your own.”

“If you possess fraternal charity, I assure you that you will certainly obtain the union I have described…Beg our Lord to grant you perfect love for your neighbor, and leave the rest to Him…  Forget your self-interests for theirs, however much nature may rebel; when opportunity occurs take some burden upon yourself to ease your neighbor of it. Do not fancy it will cost you nothing and that you will find it all done for you: think what the love He bore for us cost our Spouse, Who to free us from death, Himself suffered the most painful death of all—the death of the Cross.”

“God never sends us more than we can bear and always gives us patience first.”

“The best remedy for these crosses (I do not mean for gaining deliverance from them, for I know of nothing that will do that, but for enabling one to bear them) is to perform external works of charity and to trust in the mercy of God, which never fails those who hope in Him.”