25. If you wish to advance to the frontiers of virtue and to find unerringly the path that leads to God, do not allow your eyes to sleep or let your eyelids droop or give rest to your brow (cf. Ps. 132:4) until, with your soul riven by toil and tears, you have attained the land of dispassion and have entered into the sanctuary of the knowledge of God. For then, aloof from all that is below, in your great thirst you will have climbed like a stag to the high mountains of contemplation and through God's personalized Wisdom you will have descried the ultimate reaches of human life.
