Catherine of Genoa Quotes on Love
Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510) — the Italian mystic and hospital reformer canonized in 1737 — gave late medieval mystical theology its most distinctive treatment of pure love (puro amore), recorded in the Spiritual Dialogue and Treatise on Purgatory dictated to her disciples and confessor. The central teaching is that genuine love of God consists in the soul’s complete self-forgetfulness — the willing dissolution of every self-interested attachment in the pure flame of divine love — with the experience of purgatory understood not as external punishment but as the soul’s own desire to be cleansed of every obstacle to union. The framework shaped Friedrich von Hügel’s classic study The Mystical Element of Religion (1908) and the broader Catholic mystical tradition’s reflection on disinterested love.
Quotes
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Attributed to Catherine of Genoa:
“My deepest me is God.”
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“The fire of divine love consumes all that is not love.”
Ch. IX -
Attributed to Catherine of Genoa:
“Pure love alone purifies the soul.”
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Attributed to Catherine of Genoa:
“I cannot bear that the soul should fail to find its true repose in God.”
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Attributed to Catherine of Genoa:
“True love does not seek itself; it loses itself in its beloved.”
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“I find in myself by the grace of God a satisfaction without nourishment, love without fear”
Wikiquote -
“I am so submerged in the sweet fire of love that I cannot grasp anything except the whole of love, which melts all the marrow of my soul and body.”
Wikiquote -
“I am so plunged and submerged in the source of his infinite love, as if I were quite underwater in the sea and could not touch, see, feel anything on any side except water”
Sally Kempton, Meditation for the Love of It: Enjoying Your Own Deepest Experience (2011), p. 227