Love Quote by Richard Rolle

Rolle’s “love” isn’t a warm feeling; it’s a disciplined mental act, closer to a practiced attention than a romantic rush. Calling it a “willful stirring of our thoughts unto God” makes devotion sound like deliberate self-management: you agitate the mind away from distraction and back toward a single object. The phrasing quietly admits the problem it’s trying to solve. Thoughts don’t naturally stay “unto God,” so the believer must intervene, training desire the way you train a muscle.

The line “receive nothing that is against the love of Jesus Christ” carries the ascetic edge of medieval spirituality. Love functions as a filter, a boundary technology. It’s not just about adding holy feelings to ordinary life; it’s about refusal, about shutting out rival appetites, rival stories, rival selves. Rolle is writing out of a 14th-century English devotional culture where plague, instability, and church authority pressed hard on daily life. Against that chaos, this is an interior program that promises control and coherence.

Then he pivots to “lasting in sweetness of devotion,” a phrase that reveals why his rigor sells: the payoff is sensual, even if the sensation is spiritual. Rolle was famous for describing mystical “heat” and “song,” and you can hear that promise here - sweetness as a durable state, not a fleeting consolation prize.

“The perfection of this life” lands with careful modesty. He isn’t claiming heaven on earth; he’s offering the highest achievable human condition now: a mind so trained on Christ that it feels good, stays good, and edits the world accordingly.