Quote by Teresa of Ávila: “God alone is enough.”

At the end of everything — all ambition, all relationship, all searching — one source of completeness remains. For Teresa this was a statement of mystic experience, not theology. She had encountered something vast enough that nothing else felt lacking beside it.

Teresa wrote her famous bookmark prayer, which ends with this phrase, sometime in the mid-sixteenth century. It circulated among the Carmelite communities she founded across Spain as a summary of the mystical vision she had developed through years of contemplative practice and writing.

Spanish Carmelite nun, mystic, and reformer who founded the Discalced Carmelites and wrote foundational texts of Christian mysticism, including The Interior Castle and The Way of Perfection. She was the first woman declared a Doctor of the Catholic Church, in 1970.