2 Quotes & Sayings By Charles De Foucauld
Charles de Foucauld was a French priest, mystic, and writer. He is best known for his autobiography The Spiritual Exercises. This work recounts the spiritual exercises that de Foucauld developed to help others reach self-knowledge and self-perfection through the purification of their habits and desires. De Foucauld was born in 1865 to a bourgeois family in Paris
His father, a lawyer and officer in the French military, died shortly after Charles turned five; this event marked the beginning of de Foucauld's spiritual quest. He entered the seminary at age 11 and was ordained as a priest at age 25. He worked as a missionary in the Far East from 1894 to 1897, then returned to France where he founded his own religious community called the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. In 1900 he published The Spirits' Book as an aid for those working on de Foucauld's purification system, but its popularity propelled him into writing The Spiritual Exercises.
By 1905, he had completed seventy-nine volumes on his system. The book was not published until 1918 due to World War I. De Foucauld lived his final years in voluntary seclusion at his house on the outskirts of Paris, where he died on November 25, 1922.