Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Kempis

Love, in Thomas a Kempis's hands, isn’t a candlelit feeling. It’s an engine that ignores the dashboard warnings. The line barrels forward on a chain of active verbs - feels, thinks, attempts, pleads - as if devotion has its own musculature. That momentum is the point: true love doesn’t deliberate. It moves. By stripping away the usual accounting of effort ("burden", "trouble", "strength", "impossibility"), Kempis recasts love as a kind of holy disregard for the self’s limits.

The subtext is ascetic and strategically anti-modern: what we call "self-care" or "realism" can become, in spiritual terms, a sophisticated set of excuses. "Pleads no excuse of impossibility" reads like a pre-emptive strike against rationalization. You can almost hear the inner lawyer getting dismissed. Kempis is writing into a Christian tradition where love is less a private emotion than an act of surrender - caritas rather than romance. In that frame, love’s audacity isn’t naive; it’s borrowed confidence. The strength isn’t yours, so the math changes.

Context matters: The Imitation of Christ emerges from the Devotio Moderna, a late medieval push toward interior piety, discipline, and imitation as daily practice. The rhetoric is designed to form a reader, not merely inspire one. "All things lawful for itself" is the most dangerous phrase here, flirting with moral exceptionalism, then redeeming it by assuming love is properly ordered toward God. Misread, it licenses overreach. Read in Kempis’s world, it’s the radical claim that obedience, once internalized, feels like freedom.