Words matter. These are the best Saint Bernard Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Sorrow for sin is indeed necessary, but it should not be an endless preoccupation. You must dwell also on the glad remembrance of God’s loving-kindness; otherwise, sadness will harden the heart and lead it more deeply into despair.
Is anything, in all respects, so influential as consideration? Does it not, by a kindly anticipation, create the divisions of the active life itself, in a manner rehearsing and arranging beforehand what has to be done?
Christian, learn from Christ how you ought to love Christ. Learn a love that is tender, wise, strong; love with tenderness, not passion, wisdom, not foolishness, and strength, lest you become weary and turn away from the love of the Lord.
Who is there that can adequately gauge the greatness of the humility, gentleness, self-surrender, revealed by the Lord of majesty in assuming human nature, in accepting the punishment of death, the shame of the cross?
You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.
The mind must first reflect upon itself in order that it may frame a rule of Justice, and not be inclined to do to another what it would not have done to itself, nor refuse to another what it desires for itself. These two assuredly comprise the whole sphere of Justice.
Learn the lesson that, if you are to do the work of a prophet, what you want is not a sceptre, but a hoe. The prophet does not rise to reign, but to root out the weeds.
For every benefit conferred, God is to be praised in his gifts. Otherwise when the time of judgment comes, that man will be punished as an ingrate who cannot say to God: ‘Your statutes were my song in the land of exile.’
I myself, however wretched I may be, have been occasionally privileged to sit at the feet of the Lord Jesus, and to the extent that his merciful love allowed, have embraced with all my heart, now one, now the other, of these feet.
Custom turns everything upside down. Give it time, and what can resist its hardening effect? What does not yield to use? How many find that the bitterness they had formerly dreaded has, unfortunately, through use alone, turned to sweetness?
Truly, love is delightful and pleasant food, supplying, as it does, rest to the weary, strength to the weak, and joy to the sorrowful. It in fact renders the yoke of truth easy and its burden light.
The animal kingdom is destined by nature to serve, and that service is fulfilled in alleviating the temporal and physical needs of man; the animal spirit or soul is limited by time – it dies with the body.
You wish me to tell you why and how God should be loved. My answer is that God himself is the reason he is to be loved.
I was made a sinner by deriving my being from Adam; I am made just by being washed in the blood of Christ and not by Christ’s ‘words and example.’
God removes the sin of the one who makes humble confession, and thereby the devil loses the sovereignty he had gained over the human heart.
I believe though I do not comprehend, and I hold by faith what I cannot grasp with the mind.
There are people who go clad in tunics and have nothing to do with furs, who nevertheless are lacking in humility. Surely humility in furs is better than pride in tunics.
The impudence of the sinner displeases God as much as the modesty of the penitent gives him pleasure.
