Bernard of Clairvaux

• Believe me, you will find more lessons in the woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you what you cannot learn from masters.
• Epistola CVI, sect. 2; translation from Edward Churton The Early English Church ([1840] 1841) p. 324.

• Among us on the earth there is His memory; but in the Kingdom of heaven His very Presence. That Presence is the joy of those who have already attained to beatitude; the memory is the comfort of us who are still wayfarers, journeying towards the Fatherland.
  • From, On Loving of God, Paul Halsall trans., Ch. 3

• Liberavi animam meam.
  • I have freed my soul.
  • Letter to Abbot Suger, Epistles no. 371 (c. 1147)

• 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
  • From, On Loving of God, Paul Halsall trans., Ch. 11 .

I would count him blessed and holy to whom such rapture has been vouchsafed in this mortal life, for even an instant to lose thyself,
as if thou wert emptied and lost and swallowed up in God, is no human love; it is celestial.



 St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 – August 21 1153), abbot of Clairvaux, was a highly influential French churchman, theologian and mystic. He was one of the founders of the Cistercian, or Bernardine, monastic order.


 Source:  http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bernard_of_Clairvaux