144 Quotes by Bernard of Clairvaux

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

What of the souls already released from their bodies? We believe that they are overwhelmed in that vast sea of eternal light and of luminous eternity.

Love is alone sufficient by itself, it pleases by itself and for it’s own sake. It is itself a merit, and itself it’s own recompense. It seeks neither cause, nor consequences beyond itself. It is its own fruit, its own object and usefulness. I love because I love you, I love that I may love.

It was love that motivated His self-emptying, that led Him to become a little lower than angels, to be subject to parents, to bow His head beneath the Baptist’s hands, to endure the weakness of the flesh, and to submit to death even upon the cross.

Prayer is a wine which makes glad the heart of man.

Pride causes us to use our gifts as though they came from ourselves, not benefits received from God, and to usurp our benefactor’s glory.

God will become visible as God’s image is reborn in you.

It’s not as if grace did one half of the work and free choice the other; each does the whole work, in its own peculiar contribution. Grace does the whole work, and so does free choice – with this one qualification: That whereas the whole is done in free choice, so is the whole done of grace.

Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.