Love Quote by Saint Teresa

She turns love into a practice, not a personality trait. “Accustom yourself” has the plainspoken firmness of spiritual training: repetition, discipline, habit. Saint Teresa isn’t asking for a rush of feeling; she’s prescribing a regimen of “many acts,” the kind that can be counted, chosen, and done on days when the heart is dry. In a 16th-century Catholic world obsessed with right belief and inward purity, she offers a sly pivot: start with action, and the inner weather will follow.

The verb choice is where the quote does its real work. “Enkindle” suggests a fire that begins small and grows through tending; “melt” implies a thawing of what’s rigid, armored, self-protective. Together they sketch a psychology of the soul that feels surprisingly modern: we are creatures of habit, and we can be warmed back into life by repeated, concrete gestures. Love here is less romance than friction against the self’s hard edges.

The subtext carries Teresa’s reformer’s realism. As a Carmelite leader navigating skepticism, ecclesiastical politics, and the scrutiny that attached to outspoken mystics (especially women), she grounds lofty spirituality in behavior. Acts of love are difficult to argue with; they’re also socially legible, a kind of evidence. She’s smuggling mysticism past the gatekeepers by making it practical.

There’s also an implied warning: without habituated love, the soul cools, congeals, becomes brittle. Teresa’s line isn’t sentimental; it’s tactical. If you want a soul capable of God, start by doing love until it starts doing you.