85 Quotes by Catherine of Siena
Catherine of Siena was a remarkable medieval mystic, theologian, and influential figure in the Catholic Church. Born in the 14th century, she devoted her life to prayer, contemplation, and serving the poor and sick. Catherine's spiritual writings and letters to church authorities and political leaders demonstrated her profound wisdom, and she played a significant role in the resolution of political conflicts and ecclesiastical matters during her time. Despite being a woman in a male-dominated world, Catherine's charisma and intellectual prowess earned her respect and admiration from both common people and influential figures alike.
She advocated for reforms within the Church, calling for greater humility, simplicity, and a focus on Christ's teachings. Her commitment to fostering unity and peace in a time of division and strife earned her the title of Doctor of the Church, a recognition of her theological insights and the lasting impact of her writings. Catherine of Siena's life and teachings continue to inspire those seeking a deeper spiritual connection and a more profound understanding of the Christian faith.
Catherine of Siena Quotes
Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.
Start being brave about everything. Drive out darkness and spread light. Don’ look at your weaknesses. Realize instead that in Christ crucified you can do everything.
You are rewarded not according to your work or your time but according to the measure of your love.
Preach the Truth as if you had a million voices. It is silence that kills the world.
What is it you want to change? Your hair, your face, your body? Why? For God is in love with all those things and he might weep when they are gone.
Even if [the Pope an incarnate devil], we ought not to raise up our heads against him, but calmly lie down to rest on his bosom... He who rebels against our Father is condemned to death, for that which we do to him we do to Christ: we honor Christ if we honor the Pope; we dishonor Christ if we dishonor the Pope.
To the servant of God... every place is the right place, and every time is the right time.
A soul cannot live without loving. It must have something to love, for it was created to love.
He will provide the way and the means, such as you could never have imagined. Leave it all to Him, let go of yourself, lose yourself on the Cross, and you will find yourself entirely.
Nothing great is ever achieved without much enduring.
It is only through shadows that one comes to know the light.
We've had enough of exhortations to be silent! Cry out with a hundred thousand tongues. I see that the world is rotten because of silence.
We are of such value to God that He came to live among us... and to guide us home. He will go to any length to seek us, even to being lifted high upon the cross to draw us back to Himself. We can only respond by loving God for His love.
And of what should we be afraid? Our captain on this battlefield is Christ Jesus. We have discovered what we have to do. Christ has bound our enemies for us and weakened them that they cannot overcome us unless we so choose to let them. So we must fight courageously and mark ourselves with the sign of the most Holy Cross.
Strange that so much suffering is caused because of the misunderstandings of God's true nature. God's heart is more gentle than the Virgin's first kiss upon the Christ. And God's forgiveness to all, to any thought or act, is more certain than our own being.
God is closer to us than water is to a fish.
Proclaim the truth and do not be silent through fear.
Nails were not enough to hold God-and-man nailed and fastened on the Cross, had not love held Him there.
Make two homes for thyself, my daughter. One actual home . . . and the other a spiritual home which thou are to carry with thee always.
Ponder the fact that God has made you a gardener, to root out vice and plant virtue.
To a brave man, good and bad luck are like his left and right hand. He uses both.
You are obliged to love your neighbor as yourself, and loving him, you ought to help him spiritually, with prayer, counseling him with words, and assisting him both spiritually and temporally, according to the need in which he may be, at least with your goodwill if you have nothing else.
Eternal Trinity... mystery deep as the sea, You could give me no greater gift than the gift of Yourself. For You are a fire ever burning and never consumed, which itself consumes all the selfish love that fills my being.
You must believe in truth that whatever God gives or permits is for your salvation.
Of course you are unworthy. But when do you hope to be worthy? You will be no more worthy at the end than at the beginning. God alone is worthy of Himself, He alone can make us worthy of Him.
The devil fears hearts on fire with love of God.
Everything comes from love, all is ordained for the salvation of man, God does nothing without this goal in mind.
Do not presume to choose your own way of serving instead of the one I have made for you.
Enrich your soul in the great goodness of God: The Father is your table, the Son is your food, and the Holy Spirit waits on you and then makes His dwelling in you.
There is nothing we can desire or want that we do not find in God.
Do not be satisfied with little things, because God wants great things!
When it seems that God shows us the faults of others, keep on the safer side-it may be that your judgment is false. On your lips let silence abide. And any vice that you may ascribe to others, ascribe at once to them and yourself, in true humility. If that vice really exists in a person, he will correct himself better, seeing himself so gently understood, and will say of his own accord the thing that you would have said to him.
The soul is in God and God in the soul, just as the fish is in the sea and the sea in the fish.
Love transforms one into what one loves.
From self-knowledge flows the stream of humility, which never seizes on mere report, nor takes offense at anything, but bears every insult, every loss of consolation, and every sorry, from whatever direction they may come, patiently, with joy.
Since love for our Creator cannot be sustained unless we love others for God's sake.
Charity is the sweet and holy bond which links the soul with its Creator: it binds God with man and man with God.
There is no sin nor wrong that gives man such a foretaste of Hell in this life as anger and impatience.
It is human to sin, but diabolic to persist in sin.
One who knows more, loves more.
To join two things together there must be nothing between them or there cannot be a perfect fusion. Now realize that this is how God wants our soul to be, without any selfish love of ourselves or of others in between, just as God loves us without anything in between.
We trust and believe in what we love.
Lose yourself wholly; and the more you lose, the more you will find.
O You who are mad about Your creature! true God and true Man, You have left Yourself wholly to us, as food, so that we will not fall through weariness during our pilgrimage in this life, but will be fortified by You, celestial nourishment
Out of darkness is born the light.
There is no perfect virtue-none that bears fruit- unless it is exercised by means of our neighbor.
Let us enter into the house of knowledge of ourselves.
The Devil often places himself upon the tongues of creatures, causing them to chatter nonsensically.
The city is the image of the soul, the surrounding walls being the frontier between the outward and inward life. The gates are the faculties or senses connecting the life of the soul with the outward world. Living springs of water rise within it. And in the centre, where beats the heart, stands the holy sanctuary.
Christ Jesus left you this sweet key of obedience; for He left His Vicar, whom you are all obliged to obey until death. And whoever is outside his obedience is in a state of damnation.
Lord, take me from myself and give me to yourself.
It is the nature of love to love as much as we feel we are loved and to love whatever the one we love loves.
O Trinity, eternal Trinity! Fire, abyss of love... Was it necessary that you should give Even the Holy Trinity as food for souls?... You gave us not only your Word Through the Redemption and in the Eucharist, But you also gave yourself In the fullness of love for your creature.
Every evil, harm and suffering in this life comes from the love of riches.
How many are the pains of those who hunger for revenge! They gnaw away at themselves constantly, and they have killed themselves even before they kill their enemies.
The human heart is always drawn by love.
The strongest and purest love is not the one that starts from impressions, but the one that comes from admiration.
O fire of love! Was it not enough for You to have created us to Your image and likeness, and to have recreated us in grace through the Blood of Your Son, without giving Yourself wholly to us as our Food, O God, Divine Essence? What impelled You to do this? Your charity alone.
Perfection does not consist in macerating or killing the body, but in killing our perverse self-will.
Obedience shows whether you are grateful.
The path to heaven lies through heaven, and all the way to heaven is heaven.
Consider God's charity. Where else have we ever seen someone who has been offended voluntarily paying out his life for those who have offended him?
We were enclosed, O eternal Father, within the garden of your breast. You drew us out of your holy mind like a flower petaled with our soul's three powers and into each power you put the whole plant, so that they might bear fruit in your garden, might come back to you with the fruit you gave them. And you would come back to the soul, to fill her with your blessedness. There the soul dwells like the fish in the sea and the sea in the fish.
This my goodness does to endow the souls of the just more fully with spiritual riches when for my love they are stripped of material goods because they have renounced the world and all its pleasures and even their own will. These are the ones who fatten their souls, enlarging them in the abyss of my charity. Then I become their spiritual provider. The Holy Spirit becomes their servant.
We will be humble as we are obedient, and as obedient as we are humble.
It is impossible to fulfill the law concerning love for Me, God eternal, apart from the law concerning love for your neighbors.
Consider your possessions loaned to you by God.
God is more ready to pardon that we have been to sin.
For there is no obedience without humility, nor humility without charity.
all the vices are seasoned with pride just as the virtues are seasoned and enlivened by charity.
We've been deceived by the thought that we would be more pleasing to God in our own way than in the way God has given us.
The soul, as soon as she comes to know Me, reaches out to love her neighbors.
The devil never sleeps.
Hope comes from love, because people always trust in those they love.
People become like what they love.
What father ever gave up his son to death for the sake of his slave!
You will do very well to refuse offices; for a man seldom fails to give offense in them. It ought to weary you simply to hear them mentioned.
Every step of the way to heaven is heaven.
God cannot leave us. It is just that our soul is so vast, we do not always feel His lips upon the veil.
Obedient people never trust in themselves.
Make yourself a "capacity" and I will make myself a "torrent."
You, God, made yourself lowly and small to make us great!
A full belly does not make for a chaste spirit.
And let the truth be your delight...Proclaim it..., but with a certain congeniality.
No one should judge that he has greater perfection because he performs great penances and gives himself in excess to the staying of the body than he who does less, inasmuch as neither virtue nor merit consists therein; for otherwise he would be an evil case, who for some legitimate reason was unable to do actual penance. Merit consists in the virtue of love alone, flavored with the light of true discretion without which the soul is worth nothing.
In your nature, eternal Godhead, I shall come to know my nature. And what is my nature? It is fire, because you are nothing but a fire of love. And you have given humankind a share in this nature, for by the fire of love you created us.
too great pity is the greatest cruelty.
It is a human thing to sin, but perseverance in sin is a thing of the devil.
It's one of the properties of love to love what is loved by the person we love.
Whoever loves himself or the world inordinately becomes incompatible with himself.
Love does not stay idle.
― Catherine of Siena Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
