Saints' Discussion Forums

50 Maxims for Attaining Perfection

by Saint Alphonsus de Liguori


    1. To desire ardently to increase in the love of Jesus Christ.

    2. Often to make acts of love towards Jesus Christ. Immediately on waking, and before going to sleep, to make an act of love, seeking always to unite your own will to the will of Jesus Christ.

    3. Often to meditate on his Passion.

    4. Always to ask Jesus Christ for his love.

    5. To communicate often, and many times in the day to make spiritual Communions.

    6. Often to visit the Most Holy Sacrament.

    7. Every morning to receive from the hands of Jesus Christ himself your own cross.

    8. To desire Paradise and death, in order to be able to love Jesus Christ perfectly and for all eternity.

    9. Often to speak of the love of Jesus Christ.

    10. To accept contradictions for the sake of Jesus Christ.

    11. To rejoice in the happiness of God.

    12. To do that which is most pleasing to Jesus Christ, and not to refuse him anything that is agreeable to him.

    13. To desire and to endeavor that all should love Jesus Christ.

    14. To pray always for sinners and for the souls in purgatory.

    15. To drive from your heart every affection that does not belong to Jesus Christ.

    16. Always to have recourse to the most holy Mary, that she may obtain for us the love of Jesus Christ.

    17. To honor Mary in order to please Jesus Christ.

    18. To seek to please Jesus Christ in all your actions,

    19. To offer yourself to Jesus Christ to suffer any pain for his love.

    20 To be always determined to die rather than commit a willful venial sin.

    27. To suffer crosses patiently, saying, "Thus it pleases Jesus Christ."

    22. To renounce your own pleasures for the love of Jesus Christ.

    23. To pray as much as possible.

    24. To practice all the mortifications that obedience permits.

    25. To do all your spiritual exercises as if it were for the last time.

    26. To persevere in good works in the time of aridity.

    27. Not to do nor yet to leave undone anything through human respect.

    28. Not to complain in sickness.

    29. To love solitude, to be able to converse alone with Jesus Christ.

    30. To drive away melancholy [i.e. gloom].

    37. Often to recommend yourself to those persons who love Jesus Christ.

    32. In temptation, to have recourse to Jesus crucified, and to Mary in her sorrows.

    33. To trust entirely in the Passion of Jesus Christ.

    34. After committing a fault, not to be discouraged, but to repent and resolve to amend.

    35. To do good to those who do evil.

    36. To speak well of all, and to excuse the intention when you cannot defend the action.

    37. To help your neighbor as much as you can.

    38. Neither to say nor to do anything that might vex him. And if you have been wanting in charity, to ask his pardon and speak kindly to him.

    39. Always to speak with mildness and in a low tone.

    40. To offer to Jesus Christ all the contempt and persecution that you meet with.

    41. To look upon [religious] Superiors as the representatives of Jesus Christ.

    42. To obey without answering and without repugnance, and not to seek your own satisfaction in anything.

    43. To like the lowest employment.

    44. To like the poorest things.

    45. Not to speak either good or evil of yourself.

    46. To humble yourself even towards inferiors.

    47. Not to excuse yourself when you are reproved.

    48. Not to defend yourself when found fault with.

    49. To be silent when you are disquieted [i.e. upset].

    50. Always to renew your determination of becoming a saint, saying, "My Jesus, I desire to be all Yours, and You must be all mine."

Amen.

What a beautiful post!  :D Amen amen amen!

Good for meditation!

wow :) this is great.

How would one do #36 without showing relativism or indifferentism, though?

Yes, just like that it does sound not so great.. I think it can only be properly done in the context of other rules of the faith about when one is supposed to speak which I am sure is how it is intended.

#47, #48 and #49 seem as if they are the hardest for me, but I wonder if that's really true that those are the hardest for me. :-[

Aren't the saints such wonderful counselors?
Meditating on the passion of Our Lord has softened my heart no end.
No wonder all the saints recommend this. I wish I could live those words of St Alphonus more deeply

Martinfegan,If you like meditating on the Passion  I would recommend 'The Passion and death of Jesus Christ' by St. Alphonsus de Ligori, if you don't know about the book already. :)

Thanks Patricia, I haven't read that one but will certainly put it on my list.

  Excerpt from 'Passion and death of Jesus Christ' ------ By St. Alphonsus de Liguori

     That which most inflamed St. Paul with the love of Jesus was the thought that he chose to die, not only for all men, but for him in particular: He loved me, and delivered Himself up for me.    Yes, he has loved me, said he, and for my sake he gave himself up to die. And thus ought every one of us to say; for St. John Chrysostom asserts that God has loved every individual man with the same love with which he has loved the world.  "He loves each man separately with the same measure of charity with which he loves the whole world." So that each one of us is under a great obligation to Jesus Christ for having suffered for every one, as if he had suffered for him alone.
     For supposing, my brother, Jesus Christ had died to save you alone, leaving all others to their original ruin, what a debt of gratitude you would owe to him. But you ought to feel that you owe him a greater obligation still for having died for the salvation of all. For if he had died for you alone, what sorrow would it not have caused you to think that your neighbors, parents, brothers, and friends would be damned, and that you would when this life was over, be forever separated from them? If you and your family had been slaves, and some one came to rescue you alone, how would you not entreat of him to save your parents and brothers together with yourself! And how much more would you thank him if he did this to please you! Say, therefore to Jesus:
     O my sweetest Redeemer! Thou hast done this for me without my asking Thee; Thou hast not only saved me from death at the price of Thy blood; but also my parents and friends, so that I may have a good hope that we may all together enjoy Thy presence forever in paradise. O Lord! I thank Thee, and I love Thee, and I hope to thank Thee for it, and to love Thee forever in that blessed country.

It is such a good meditation to try to comprehend, that impossible to comprehend, depth of God's love for us!  ;D

Shin, I just discovered that you have the 'Passion and death of Jesus Christ' on your list of books on Saintsquotes.. :speachless:  Is that a lot of work? How long does it take ?

It's a splendid read..

All of St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori's works are HUGE.

We're never going to get a plain text of it up I'm betting so, PDF only. Too big and complex, and too many OCR mistakes.

Still, if lightning ever strikes, or I get enough donations, I bet if it was put up on a group-work wiki type page we might eventually get enough volunteers to spiff it up step by step. There are a good number of St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori fans out there.  :D

Well here I am rambling on. The PDF was scanned by the Internet Archive so it was no work at all here, truly.  :D

Since God knew that man is enticed by favors, he wished to bind him to his love by means of his gifts: I want to catch men with the snares, those chains of love in which they allow themselves to be entrapped, so that they will love me. And all the gifts which he bestowed on man were given to this end. He gave him a soul, made in his likeness. He endowed him with memory, intellect and will; he gave him a body equipped with the senses. It was for him that he created heaven and earth and such an abundance of things. He made all these things out of love for man, so that all creation might serve man, and man in turn might love God out of gratitude for so many gifts.

~~Saint Alphonsus Liguori  from a sermon

Patricia is that the book you recommended to me in an earlier thread?
Will certainly read this.

Yes, it is, Martin . :)   Shin has the best collection on his books site.

The saints are the best!  :D

Martin, Patricia, how are your computers doing? Do you need any advice?  ;D


'I say it is even a duty; for Christian charity commands us to relieve our neighbors who stand in need of our assistance.'

St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori

Thanks Shin for the offer. It's to do with the USB ports and not able to start some devices. It's about 7 years old this pc of mine and really I think it needs replacing but feel guilty about spending big bucks to do this when other demands keep cropping up like my eldest son who is going to university in London soon and will need some initial financial support ( the list seems endless sometimes) but I'll get someone to look at it and see if it's worth repairing.
Do we have a patron St of computers?  :+:

I don't know of one yet!

Perhaps St. Isidore of Seville, hmm I think it's unofficial but.. :) He and St. Clare have some technological associations.

'Prayer  purifies us, reading instructs us. Both are good when both are possible. Otherwise, prayer is better than reading. If a man wants to be always in God’s company, he must pray regularly and read regularly. When we pray, we talk to God; when we read, God talks to us. All spiritual growth comes from reading and reflection. By reading we learn what we did not know; by reflection we retain what we have learned. Reading the holy Scriptures confers two benefits. It trains the mind to understand them; it turns man’s attention from the follies of the world and leads him to the love of God. The conscientious reader will be more concerned to carry out what he has read than merely to acquire knowledge of it. In reading we aim at knowing, but we must put into practice what we have learned in our course of study. The more you devote yourself to study of the sacred utterances, the richer will be your understanding of them, just as the more the soil is tilled, the richer the harvest. The man who is slow to grasp things but who really tries hard is rewarded, equally he who does not cultivate his God-given intellectual ability is condemned for despising his gifts and sinning by sloth. Learning unsupported by grace may get into our ears; it never reaches the heart. But when God’s grace touches our innermost minds to bring understanding, his word which has been received by the ear sinks deep into the heart.'

- from Book of Maxims by Saint Isidore of Seville

That's a beuatiful quote on prayer and spiritual reading. By reading Holy scripture and the saints we learn so much about what is good and pleasing to God and then we know what is good for us and what we need to pray for.

Shin you must be right about those saints as they've just confirmed your thoughts. I turned on my computer an hr ago and all these install prompts came on the screen so I just kept clicking on them as they appeared and what do ya know? I have my internet back.
St. Isidore of Seville and St. Clare Thank you so much. Another two for my daily invocation. I'm gonna end up having to make a general prayer like "All you holy saints in heaven pray for us." hehehe

PS. Just realized the topic of this thread is St. Alphonsus de Liguori who I've been reading for the past 2 weeks  :)

I'll have to remember these two saints for my computer too. :)

I wonder if those two Saints will work for my scanner too (or my knowledge of it)?

Of course they will Brigid..  :+:

 O:)

 When he was bishop, one of St. Alphonsus’s priests led a worldly life, and resisted all attempts to change. He was summoned to St. Alphonsus de Liguori, and at the entrance to the bishop‘s study he found a large crucifix laid on the threshold. When the priest hesitated to step in, St. Alphonsus quietly said, “Come along, and be sure to trample it underfoot. It would not be the first time you have placed Our Lord beneath your feet.”