Getting rid of these, too, requires looking to God for help, trusting him alone, and submitting to his direction. [47] Then if you’re not willing to do this – all tears and agitation – you will serve someone physically more powerful than you, and continue to look outside yourself for happiness, fated never to find it. And that is because you look for it in the wrong place, forgetting to look where it really lies.

My Lord and my God, take from me everything that distances me from you. My Lord and my God, give me everything that brings me closer to you. My Lord and my God, detach me from myself to give my all to you.51

To really find God is to search for him not only in ourselves, not only in our loved ones, not only in our neighbors, not only in the strangers that we encounter, but ultimately in our enemies as well.

There is no better advice on how to find God than to seek him where we left him: do now, when you cannot find God, what you did when last you had him, and then you will find him again.

We too are called to withdraw at certain intervals into deeper silence and aloneness with God, together as a community as well as personally; to be alone with Him — not with our books, thoughts, and memories but completely stripped of everything — to dwell lovingly in His presence, silent, empty, expectant, and motionless. We cannot find God in noise or agitation.

They who seek God with all their hearts must, however, some day on their way meet Jesus.1

Simply do this: be still and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is, all concepts you have learned about the world, all images you hold about yourself. Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God. 8

Purge me from every sinful blot;
My idols all be cast aside:
Cleanse me from every evil thought,
From all the filth of self and pride.

The hatred of the carnal mind
Out of my flesh at once remove:
Give me a tender heart, resigned,
And pure, and full of faith and love.

Let nothing disturb you. Let nothing frighten you. Everything passes away except God.

Everything else can wait but your search for God cannot wait.

It's not possible to search for God using the methods of a detective... There is no way. You can only wait till God's axe severs your roots: then you will understand that you are here only through a miracle, and you will remain fixed forever in wonderment and equilibrium.

There is but one way to tranquility of mind and happiness, and that is to account no external things thine own, but to commit all to God.

God will break your heart.

Let the Lord your God be your hope – seek for nothing else from him, but let him himself be your hope. There are people who hope from him riches or perishable and transitory honours, in short they hope to get from God things which are not God himself.