John of St. Samson Quotes

This path is so delightful and delectable that anyone who knows it will lovingly travel it at his own cost and expense. Such happiness is beyond words.

The sight of the intuitive and ravishing Beauty of God holds her as if asleep in its delectable bosom...This state surpasses all human definition and comparison.

Such is the effect of love's flood rushing into its lovers. It sweeps them away, ravishes them, and swamps them in its waves. These people become love itself — its spirit, its divinity — insofar as it is possible for any creature in this life.

This love is so overpowering that the will alone enters the amorous bosom of love, where it savors an unutterable love beyond all understanding and expression. All the while, the dumbfounded intellect remains paralyzed at the gate.

The way to attain love is to love. A less excellent love leads to a greater love, and a greater love in turn leads to the highest love, as well as to the most excellent and ultimate fruits of active love. Each of these degrees has its own theory and practice. All of them, especially the last degrees, possess a simple, exalted, and singular contemplation of the divine Object, which constantly exerts a powerful influence on the soul and ravishes it with delight.

Aspiration, practiced as a familiar, respectful and loving conversation with God, is such an excellent method, that, by means of it, one soon arrives at the summit of all perfection, and falls in love with Love.

Aspiring then is an expression of love: a love so purely and radically expressed that it transcends all loves that are comprehensible by the senses, the reason or the intellect. By the impetuosity and force of the Spirit of God, it arrives at union with God, not by chance but by a sudden transformation of the spirit in God.

Of what sort is this truth in its accomplishment in us both, your spouses cannot lay their eyes on me without seeing that I am your cherished and unique bride, by the evident and manifest signs of your radiant and exuberant love, which manifestly flow from me to you, whether I perceive them or not, yet all my desire is to be perpetually within, hidden and known only to you who are my Bridegroom, my Life and my All.

What is all this? Let him conceive it if he can, express it if he knows how, if he desires to; if one can it is licit, but it is better to shut up as one should; because it is here that our intuitive joy, respectively and mutually in us both, speaks, not of this nor anything like it, but something infinitely other than this, by its profundity, and perpetual and ineffable silence.

Sing boldly, O spouses of a Bridegroom such as mine! you, I say, whom are my companions in this fate and enjoyment so happy as ours! Sing at my happy insistence as I will sing by yours, a new song containing endless praises of the infinitely excessive grandeur and love of our Bridegroom, coming to so admirably espouse us, to deiformly deify us of him and in him, and to make us oneself of oneself.

I don’t want anything more than to be one of your spouses employed by you to announce that they languish for your love.

In a word, frankly, I am in love with the love in my Spouse.

Tell me, my Life and my Spouse, this whole ineffable mystery, is it not rather for the admiration of the Seraphim, than for the expression of one like me, your spouse, who doesn’t know what to do about this, except to babble.

I have three homes here below, each very appealing: The Cross, Love, and the Sepulchre; all of them are to me as One, and raise me above nature, and above its wearisome hold.

Love does not always choose the same dwelling place, it makes many exploits in men here below; It has its night, its day, and its many levels: only the one who has overall happiness is content. It moves, it suffers in God, its first cause and the unique happiness of the celestial Spirits; It is there that it is always equally enraptured, by the Seraphic love which is above all things.