The Saints Speak About Love

What is really essential, what is the most important thing for us to focus on during our life on earth? The saints all seem to agree that it is love.

“Where there is hatred, let me sow love” – St Francis of Assisi

“Spread love everywhere you go: first of all in your own house. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next-door neighbour… Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile, kindness in your warm greeting.”
~ Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta

As for what concerns our relations with our fellow men, the anguish in our neighbor’s soul must break all precept. All that we do is a means to an end, but love is an end in itself, because God is love.

– Edith Stein 8b36d790ab7b2ca209d1a4af926d753c1

Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing stronger or higher or wider; nothing is more pleasant, nothing fuller, and nothing better in heaven or on earth, for love is born of God and cannot rest except in God, Who is above all created things.

-Imitation of Christ,

Thomas A Kempis

You know well enough that Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, nor even at their difficulty, but at the love with which we do them.

-Saint Therese of Lisieux

Pure love … knows that only one thing is needed to please God: to do even the smallest things out of great love – love, and always love.

(140)–Divine Mercy in My Soul, St. Faustina

“We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become. If we love things, we become a thing. If we love nothing, we become nothing. Imitation is not a literal mimicking of Christ, rather it means becoming the image of the beloved, an image disclosed through transformation. This means we are to become vessels of God´s compassionate love for others. ”