Through the Rosary, Mary teaches us to contemplate the Lord

There is a very simple way to carry out the great work of our lives, which is prayer, and that is the Rosary. The Rosary can become our school of prayer, as long as we agree to become simple again, like little children who don't show off or get a big head! 

The Rosary is a Marian school. We let the Virgin Mary teach us to contemplate the Lord, to keep the Word deep in our hearts, and to remodel our hearts according to hers. 

The Rosary consists in the meditated repetition of the Angelic Salutation in groups of tens (decades), separated by doxologies. I say "meditated", not in itself and in its literality, but in all the mysteries it evokes, because the whole life of Jesus, with all its teachings, is contained in the fact suggested with such delicate grandeur by this incomparable pearl which is the Ave Maria.

Father Sertillange, in La Prière, Paris, Librairie de l'art catholique, 1917