LOVE
God is love....
1 John 4:16
"When did God's love for you begin? When He began to be God. When did He begin to be God? Never, for He has always been without beginning and without end, and so He has always loved you from eternity."
+St. Francis de Sales
"God loves each of us as if there were only one of us."
+St. Augustine
"He loved us personally…centuries before we were born"
+St. Peter Julian Eymard
"At last I have found my calling, my calling is love."
+St. Therese of the Child Jesus
"Love is the reason for my life."
+Bl. Mother Teresa
"I shall spend every moment loving. One who loves does not notice her trials; or perhaps more accurately, she is able to love them."
+St. Bernadette Soubirous
"Love above everything the glory of God. May God, infinitely good, be the aim of your words, your thoughts, and your actions."
+St. Ignatius of Loyola
"Take for your motto: Love has conquered me, it alone shall possess my heart."
+St. Margaret Mary Alacoque
"Let me live by love, let me die of love, and let my last heartbeat be an act of the most perfect love."
+St. Marie Victoire Therese Couderc
"We are born to love, we live to love, and we will die to love still more."
+St. Joseph Cafasso
"Live lost in divine love. Live for divine love and of divine love."
+St. Paul of the Cross
"Love will be our Eternity"
+St. Teresa Benedicta
"There is but one right kind of ambition: to love God, and as the reward of loving him, to love him more."
+St. Ignatius of Loyola
"Love speaks little. The language of divine love is a burning heart; no words can express its ardors; they make of the loving soul a victim of love, a holocaust, consumed and reduced to ashes in the divine fire of charity."
+St. Paul of the Cross
"Go and set the whole world on fire with the fire of Divine love."
+St. Ignatius of Loyola
"I will go anywhere and do anything in order to communicate the love of Jesus to those who do not know Him or have forgotten Him."
+St. Frances Cabrini
"Things are at rest when they are in their proper place. The proper place for the heart of a human being is the Heart of God."
+St. Augustine
"You ask me a method of attaining perfection. I know of love - and only love. Love can do all things."
+St. Therese of Lisieux
"Love is shown more in deeds than in words."
+St. Ignatius of Loyola
"Let all that you do be done in love."
1 Corinthians 16:14
"Love is repaid by love alone … and nourished by sacrifice."
+St.Therese
"Let God love you through others, and let God love others through you."
~D. M. Street
"He who is filled with love is filled with God Himself."
+St. Augustine
"The greatest weakness of most humans is their hesitancy to tell others how much they love them while they're still alive."
~Orlando A. Battista
"We must above all show charity to our enemies. By this you may know that a man is a true Christian, if he seeks to do good to those who wish him evil."
+St. Alphonsus Liguori
"The sign of sincere love is to forgive wrongs done to us. It was with such love that the Lord loved the world."
+St. Mark the Ascetic
"It is a great virtue to accept patiently whatever comes and, as the Lord enjoins, to love a neighbor who hates you."
+St. Mark the Ascetic
"As for the aversion that people express for you, their mockeries, their derisions, and so forth, you should receive them with gratitude to God, for as oil is consumed by the flame, so ought charity (love) consume its victim."
+St. Paul of the Cross
"We must unite ourselves to God's will. Even those that we suffer from man...for example, contempt, injustice, loss of reputation, loss of temporal goods and all kinds of persecutions. On these occasions we must remember that whilst God doesn't will the sin, He does will our humiliation, our poverty, or our mortification, as the case may be. It is certain and of Faith, that whatever happens, happens by the will of God. Our conduct in such instances is the true measure of our love for God."
+St. Alphonsus Liguori
"I entrust myself to my Creator God, I love him with my whole heart."
+St. Joan of Arc
TRUTH
"The Spirit is the one who testifies, and the Spirit is truth."
1 John 5:6
"Even to the death fight for truth, and the Lord your God will battle for you."
Sirach 4:28
"God is not only true, but Truth itself."
~Pope Leo XIII
"Let your 'Yes' mean 'Yes,' and your 'No' mean 'No.' Anything more is from the Evil One."
Matthew 5:37
"Cursed be gossips and the double-tongued, for they destroy the peace of many."
Sirach 28:13
"I tell you, on the day of judgment people will render an account for every careless word they speak. By your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned."
Matthew 12:36-37
"You destroy all who speak falsely. Murderers and deceivers the Lord abhors."
Psalm 5:7
"Whoever would love life and see good days must keep the tongue from evil and the lips from speaking deceit.
1 Peter 3:10
"Keep your tongue from evil, your lips from speaking lies."
Psalm 34:14
"Fire is produced from stone and steel; lying comes from loquacity and gossip. And the lie destroys love. No one who has any sense would say that telling lies is not an important sin. The Holy Spirit has severely condemned it. "You destroy those that speak lies," says David to God. (Ps. 5, 7) The mother of lying is hypocrisy, mother and also, often, its substance as well. Hypocrisy in fact works out the lie beforehand and then puts it into practice. Those who possess the fear of God are the furthest from telling lies, because they have an honest judge, their own conscience."
+St. John Climacus
"We should express ourselves in few words ; the truth is all its simplicity suffices."
+St. Ignatius of Loyola
"Truth is one; contradictions of the truth are manifold."
+St. Cyril of Jerusalem
"A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal, in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying — lying to others and to yourself."
~Dostoyevsky
"I love you, and because I love you, I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies."
~Pietro Aretino
"Have I become your enemy by telling you the truth?"
Galatians 4:16
"Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love, and do not accept anything as love which lacks truth! One without the other becomes a destructive lie."
+St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross
"It is never lawful to tell a lie; we ought always to speak the truth, whatever it may cost us."
+St. Benedict Joseph Labre
"Preach the truth as if we had a million voices, for it is silence that kills the world."
+St. Catherine of Siena
"The ugly words of men count for nothing when your conscience is clear."
+St. Lupus of Sens
"Truth always ends by victory; it is not unassailable, but invincible."
+St. Ignatius of Loyola
"Truth fears no trial."
~Anonymous
"The truth is not always the same as the majority decision."
~Ven. Pope John Paul II
"Lying's a certain mark of cowardice."
~Thomas Southern
"It is the act of a bad man to deceive by falsehood."
~Cicero
"No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true."
~Nathaniel Hawthorne
"You should not live one way in private, another in public."
~Syrus
"He who tells a lie is not sensible how great a task he undertakes; for he must be forced to invent twenty more to maintain that one."
~Alexander Pope
"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil."
~Socrates
"By a lie a person throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a person."
~Emmanuel Kant
"Self-love is so subtle a robber that it commits its thefts, even upon God himself, without fear or shame, employing his goods as if they were its own, and assigning as a reason that it cannot live without them. And this robbery is hidden under so many veils of apparent good that it can hardly be detected except by the penetrating light of true love, which always desires to remain uncovered and bare, both in heaven and earth, because it has nothing shameful to conceal. And, therefore, self-love never understands the nature of pure love; for pure love sees not how the things which it knows as they are in truth could possibly be possessed or appropriated; nothing would displease it so much as to find anything which it could call its own; the reason of this is that pure love sees not, nor can it ever see, anything but truth itself, which, being by its nature communicable to all, can never be monopolized by any. Self-love, on the other hand, is in itself an obstacle to truth, and neither believes it nor beholds it, but rather, confiding in itself, holds truth as an enemy and an alien."
+St. Catherine of Genoa
"Whoever slanders another in secret I reduce to silence."
Psalm 101:5
"Do not go about spreading slander among your people."
Exodus 20:16
"You shall not lie or speak falsely to one another."
"You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor."
Leviticus 19:11,16
"It is the lips of the liar that conceal hostility; but he who spreads accusations is a fool."
Proverbs 10:18
"I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence."
~Frederick Douglass
"Telling someone the truth is a loving act."
~Mal Pancoast
"The truth may hurt but a lie can cut a deeper wound."
~Unknown
"If man remembered that it is written: "By your words you will be justified and by your words you will be condemned," (Matt 12:37) he would choose to remain silent."
+St. Poemen
"We will either accuse ourselves or excuse ourselves."
+St. John Vianney
"Truth is the greatest gift of life and love is the exercise of that truth."
~Unknown
"The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear."
~Herbert Agar
"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth."
~Marcus Aurelius
"Every story has three sides. Yours, mine and the facts."
~Foster M. Russell
"It takes two to speak the truth—one to speak, and another to hear."
~Henry David Thoreau
"What purpose has a 'freedom' which, in disregarding truth, pursues what is false or wrong? How many young people have been offered a hand which in the name of freedom or experience has led them to addiction, to moral or intellectual confusion, to hurt, to a loss of self-respect, even to despair and so tragically and sadly to the taking of their own life? Dear friends, truth is not an imposition. Nor is it simply a set of rules. It is a discovery of the One who never fails us; the One whom we can always trust. In seeking truth we come to live by belief because ultimately truth is a person: Jesus Christ. That is why authentic freedom is not an opting out. It is an opting in; nothing less than letting go of self and allowing oneself to be drawn into Christ’s very being for others."
~Pope Benedict XVI
"The modern mind will accept nothing on authority, but will accept anything on no authority. Say that the Bible or the Pope says so and it will be dismissed without further examination. But preface your remark with "I think I heard somewhere," or, try but fail to remember the name of some professor who might have said "such-and-such," and it will be immediately accepted as an unshakable fact."
~G. K. Chesterton
Christ said, “I am the Truth”; he did not say “I am the custom.” +St. Toribio
"There are six things the Lord hates, yes, seven are an abomination to him; Haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood; a heart that plots wicked schemes, feet that run swiftly to evil, the false witness who utters lies, and he who sows discord among brothers." Proverbs 6:16-19
"Slander slays three persons: the speaker, the spoken to, and the spoken of."
~Hebrew Proverb
"Slander is worse than cannibalism.
+St. John Chrysostom
"Slander is a poison which kills charity, both in the slanderer and the one who listens."
+St. Bernard
"Slander meets no regard from noble minds; only the base believe what the base only utter."
~John Bellers
"Slander is a vice that strikes a double blow, wounding both him that commits and him against whom it is committed."
~Bernard Joseph Saurin
"To murder character is as truly a crime as to murder the body: the tongue of the slanderer is brother to the dagger of the assassin."
~Tryon Edwards
"Slander is a complication, a comprisal and sum of all wickedness."
~Isaac Barrow
"Nothing is so swift as calumny; nothing is more easily uttered; nothing more readily received; nothing more widely dispersed."
~Cicero
"A rumor goes in one ear and out many mouths."
~Chinese proverb
"To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves."
~Unknown
"Twas slander filled her mouth with lying words; Slander, the foulest whelp of Sin."
~Robert Pollok
"He that lends an easy and credulous ear to calumny is either a man of very ill morals or has no more sense and understanding than a child."
~Menander
"When a man points a finger at someone else, he should remember that four of his fingers are pointing at himself."
~Louis Nizer
"Some say it is unreasonable to be courteous and gentle with a reckless person who insults you for no reason at all. I have made a pact with my tongue; not to speak when my heart is disturbed."
+St. Francis de Sales
"Calumny is a monstrous vice: for, where parties indulge in it, there are always two that are actively engaged in doing wrong, and one who is subject to injury. The calumniator inflicts wrong by slandering the absent; he who gives credit to the calumny before he has investigated the truth is equally implicated. The person traduced is doubly injured--first by him who propagates, and secondly by him who credits the calumny."
~Herodotus
"The intent to harm another behind hate-speak vetoes its credibility."
~Vanna Bonta
"To the extent that you pray with all your soul for the person who slanders you, God will make the truth known to those who have been scandalized by the slander."
+St. Maximos the Confessor
"Divine Providence, in its own good time, will defend the innocent."
+St. John Bosco
HUMILITY
"Here is one of the best means to acquire humility; fix well in mind this maxim: One is as much as he is in the sight of God, and no more."
+St. Francis of Assisi
"I am she who is not.... You alone are He Who Is."
+St. Catherine of Siena
"The sufficiency of my merit is to know that my merit is not sufficient."
+St. Augustine
"Refer everything that you do to God; strive to offer Him all the good you find in yourself, acknowledging that this comes from God, and thank Him for it."
+St. Ignatius of Loyola
"To be taken with love for a soul, God does not look on its greatness, but the greatness of its humility."
+St John of the Cross
"Humility is the only virtue no devil can imitate."
+St. John Climacus
"Should you ask me what is the first thing in religion, I should reply that the first, second, and third thing therein is humility."
+St. Augustine
"Whenever we do a good work, and somebody else takes the credit of it, we ought to rejoice, and acknowledge it as a gift from God. Anyhow, we ought not to be sorry, because if others diminish our glory before men, we shall recover it with all the more honour before God."
+St. Philip Neri
"Our Lord needs from us neither great deeds nor profound thoughts. Neither intelligence nor talents. He cherishes simplicity."
+Saint Therese of Lisieux
"A soul which exalts itself abases God; but a soul which abases itself exalts God."
+St. Augustine
"Let each one remember that he will make progress in all spiritual things only insofar as he rids himself of self-love, self-will, and self-interest."
+St. Ignatius of Loyola
"If humble souls are contradicted, they remain calm; if they are calumniated, they suffer with patience; if they are little esteemed, neglected, or forgotten, they consider that their due; if they are weighed down with occupations, they perform them cheerfully."
+St. Vincent de Paul
"From humility of heart proceed serenity of mind, gentleness of conduct, interior peace, and every good."
+St. Paul of the Cross
"Take a moment to think of everything you're proud of about yourself and your life, then ask yourself if you would have any of this without God's permission and aid? Give credit where credit is due; praise and thank Him, not yourself."
+St. Francis of Assisi
"If thou wouldst glory, let it be in the Lord, by referring everything to Him, and giving to Him all the honor and glory."
~Ven. Louis de Granada
"Humility contains all things because in this virtue is truth; therefore God must also dwell therein, since He is the truth."
+St. Augustine
"Be careful to give no credit to yourself for anything; if you do, you are stealing from God, to whom alone every good thing is due."
+St. Vincent de Paul
"It is a fault, not a virtue, to wish your humility recognized and applauded."
+St. Bernard of Clairvaux
"Refer everything that you do to God; strive to offer Him all the good you find in yourself, acknowledging that this comes from God, and thank Him for it."
+St. Ignatius of Loyola
"In humility is perfect freedom."
~Thomas Merton
"Pride does its own will; humility does the will of God."
+Saint Augustine
"The truly humble man fears only that some honor might be shown him; and if such a thing should happen to him, he is interiorly alarmed and distressed at it; he compares himself with no one, neither his superiors, his inferiors, nor yet with his equals, for he esteems himself the last of all. He despises no one but himself; he desires ardently to be despised by all the world, and sincerely rejoices in contempt. Such a man fears no dishonor, because he loves no honor."
+St. Albert the Great
"The truly humble reject all praise for themselves, and refer it all to God."
+St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori
"To do well and to feel that we do nothing well is a sign of deep humility."
+St. Paul of the Cross
"Humility is nothing but truth, and pride is nothing but lying."
+St. Vincent de Paul
PURITY
"Women should adorn themselves with proper clothing, modestly and discreetly".... "This is what is proper for women who claim to have reverence for God."
1Timothy 2:9-10
"The sins which lead most souls to hell are sins of the flesh! Certain fashions are going to be introduced which will offend Our Lord very much. Those who serve God should not follow these fashions. The Church has no fashions; Our Lord is always the same."
+Bl. Jacinta of Fatima
"If a certain kind of dress constitutes a grave and proximate occasion of sin, and endangers the salvation of your soul and others, it is your duty to give it up."
~Pope Pius XII
"Either we must speak as we dress, or dress as we speak. Why do we profess one thing and display another? The tongue talks of chastity, but the whole body reveals impurity."
+St. Jerome
"By the virtue of modesty the devout person governs all his exterior acts. With good reason, then, does St. Paul recommend this virtue to all and declare how necessary it is and as if this were not enough he considers that this virtue should be obvious to all."
+St. Padre Pio
"I also recommend to you holy modesty at all times and in all places, because we are always in the presence of God, Who is everywhere."
+St. Paul of the Cross
"Don't say you have a chaste mind if you have unchaste eyes, because an unchaste eye is the messenger of an unchaste heart."
+St. Augustine
"Let the admirable modesty of your Saviour be seen in your countenance, in your movements, and in your apparel."
+St. Paul of the Cross
"People sometimes treat others as objects to satisfy their own needs rather than as persons to be loved and cherished. How easy it is to be deceived by the many voices in our society that advocate a permissive approach to sexuality, without regard for modesty, self-respect or the moral values that bring quality to human relationships! This is worship of a false god. Instead of bringing life, it brings death."
~Pope Benedict XVI
"True happiness, dear friends, does not consist in the pleasures of the world or in earthly things, but in peace of conscience, which we have only if we are pure in heart and mind."
+Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati
