I am the divine Lover who takes possession of those who love me, fills those souls with graces and with divine charity. I am the Love who, in taking possession of those souls, allows myself to be possessed by them… I am foolishly in love with souls. – Our Lord to St. Frances of Rome, as quoted in Blessings of the Daily
God’s passionate love for his people – for humanity – is at the same time a forgiving love. It is so great that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice. Here Christians can see a dim prefigurement of the mystery of the Cross: so great is God’s love for man that by becoming man he follows him even into death, and so reconciles justice and love. – Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est
Anyone who loves God in the depths of his heart has already been loved by God. In fact, the measure of a man’s love for God depends upon how deeply aware he is of God’s love for him. – Diadochus of Photice
Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair. – G.K. Chesterton
Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift. Certainly, as the Lord tell us, one can become a source from which rivers of living water flow. Yet to become such a source, one must constantly drink anew from the original source, which is Jesus Christ, from whose pierced heart flows the love of God. – Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est
Everything begins with the love of God: this is what gives rise to the real knowledge which can fulfill man’s yearning: the spousal knowledge God has of those who love him and that he necessarily shares with them. – Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Does Jesus Know Us, Do We Know Him?
At the end of the parable of the lost sheep Jesus recalled that God’s love excludes no one: ‘So it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.’ He affirms that he came ‘to give his life as a ransom for many’; this last term is not restrictive, but contrasts the whole of humanity with the unique person of the redeemer who hands himself over to save us. The Church, following the apostles, teaches that Christ died for all men without exception: ‘There is not, never has been, and never will be a single human being for whom Christ did not suffer.’ – The Catechism of the Catholic Church #605
In spite of skepticism around us, our faith allows us to cling to certain things with steadfastness: God exists! He loves us passionately! – Timothy Cardinal Dolan
What we love, we shall grow to resemble. – St. Bernard of Clairvaux
For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the Love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. – St. Paul to the Romans 8:38-39
There were solitudes beyond where none shall follow. There were secrets in the inmost and invisible part of that drama that have no symbol in speech; or in any severance of a man from men. Nor is it easy for any words less stark and single-minded than those of the naked narrative even to hint at the horror of exaltation that lifted itself above the hill. Endless expositions have not come to the end of it, or even to the beginning. And if there be any sound that can produce a silence, we may surely be silent about the end and the extremity; when a cry was driven out of that darkness in words dreadfully distinct and dreadfully unintelligible, which man shall never understand in all the eternity they have purchased for him; and for one annihilating instant an abyss that is not for our thoughts had opened even in the unity of the absolute; and God had been forsaken of God. – G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
We are to love God for Himself, because of a twofold reason; nothing is more reasonable, nothing more profitable. -St. Bernard of Clairvaux
Living Differently 