Love & Passion Quote by Thomas Kempis

Kempis is trying to rescue love from the marketplace. In a culture where devotion can be measured in tokens, favors, and the unspoken ledger of who owes whom, he draws a hard line: “purity” isn’t about being naive, it’s about refusing to treat affection like a transaction. The sentence turns on a quiet inversion. The “gift of the lover” sounds grand, even romantic, but Kempis frames it as a temptation: the shiny, legible proof that someone cares. “The love of the giver,” by contrast, is invisible, interior, and therefore harder to counterfeit.

The subtext is spiritual and frankly suspicious of human motives. Kempis, steeped in the devotional tradition of The Imitation of Christ, is training the reader to prefer intention over outcome, sincerity over spectacle. He’s also warning against the ego’s hunger to be validated. If you demand gifts, you’re not just asking for generosity; you’re asking to be made secure, to be ranked, to be chosen in a way you can point to. That’s how attachment disguises itself as romance.

The line works because it’s austere. It doesn’t flatter the reader with “you deserve more.” It asks for a sharper discipline: to love without leveraging, to receive without collecting receipts. In modern terms, it’s an argument against performative affection and for a kind of relational literacy that reads the person, not the prop. Kempis isn’t condemning gifts; he’s demoting them. The point is to keep love from being reduced to evidence.