It is an astonishing thing that the true intellectual seems to escape those sad effects of age that are death before their time to so many men. He remains young up to the end. One

The reward of a work is to have produced it; the reward of effort is to have grown by it.

"People do not speak ill,” writes St. Augustine, “before the man who does not listen.”

Having thus drawn your advantage from it, leave the rest to the Lord who judges for you and will do justice in His good time.

When a reproach is leveled at you, instead of rebelling interiorly or exteriorly like an animal bristling up, observe like a man the bearing of what is said; be impersonal and honest. If the criticism is right and you wrong, do you mean to resist truth?

Be silent; humble yourself before God; distrust your judgment and correct your mistakes; then stay firm as the rock lashed by the waves.

It is childish to defend one's work or to try to establish its worth. Worth defends itself.

Not in vain is idleness called the mother of all vices; it is also the mother of discouragement and of trials, or at least it contributes to them.

If you are idle and investigate your body, you will probably feel a good deal of vague discomfort of various kinds; work energetically and you will forget it all. We can say the same about the troubles of the soul. When I ask myself what remedy I shall use against the fits of anxiety and dullness that come over me in my work, I find only one