Love is not "fulfilling" oneself through the use of another. Love is giving oneself to another, for the good of the other, and receiving the other as a gift.78 The lethal paradox of the age was that, for all its alleged humanism, it had ended up devaluing the human person into an economic unit, an ideological category, an expression of a class or race or ethnicity.

What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to lovel

It is not what we do, it is how much love we put in the doing.

Sacrifice is the ecstasy of giving the best we have to the One we love most.

All that is good in Heaven and on Earth is born of love. This war is not just. This war is not good. Love is the only thing worth fighting for.

The mark of spirituality is the fragrance of Christ in our lives and the fragrance of Christ in every aspect of who we are as a person.

Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.

Nails were not enough to hold God-and-man nailed and fastened on the Cross, had not love held Him there.

The only way love can be shown in this world is by sacrifice —namely, the surrender of one thing for another. Love is essentially bound up with choice, and choice is a negation, and negation is a sacrifice. When a young man sets his heart upon a young woman and asks her to marry him, he is not only saying "I choose you"; he is also saying "I do not choose, I reject, all others. I give them all up for you." Apply this to the problem of lust.

What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!

What a great thing, to be loved! What a greater thing still, to love! The heart becomes heroic though passion…if no one loved, the sun would go out.

At the moment when her eyes closed, when all feeling vanished in her, she thought that she felt a touch of fire imprinted on her lips, a kiss more burning than the red-hot iron of the executioner.