more quotes, quotations and passages on love

love - love 2 - love 3 - love 5 - love 6

Love and compassion are
necessities, not luxuries.
Without them humanity
cannot survive.

the Dalai Lama

After you have been kind, after love has stolen forth into the world and done its beautiful work, go back into the shade again and say nothing about it. Love hides even from itself. Love waives even self-satisfaction. “Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.” Henry Drummond

Love is something you and I must have. We must have it because our spirit feeds upon it. We must have it because without it we become weak and faint. Without love our self-esteem weakens. Without it our courage fails. Without love we can no longer look confidently at the world. We turn inward and begin to feed upon our own personalities, and little by little we destroy ourselves. With it we are creative. With it we march tirelessly. With it, and with it alone, we are able to sacrifice for others. Chief Dan George

Love is a short word but it contains everything. unknown Love will find a way. Indifference will find an excuse. unattributed

The impression is that love is something that happens to you like magic. That love is something others do for you, but that you cannot do for yourself. Love is not something you wait for. Love doesn't just happen. Love is something you do. When you want love, give love. Moment to moment, you make the choice whether to give love and be loved. Jennifer James

Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and
whoever loves much, performs much, and can accomplish
much, and that which is done in love is well done.

Vincent van Gogh

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True love is both loving and letting oneself be loved.
It is harder to let ourselves be loved than it is to love.

Pope Francis

Most people think of love as some sort of power outside of themselves that
will "take them away from all of this." Sadly, this is not the case. Love exists
only within our own hearts, and to have happy relationships we must first
become truly loving people. And as we fill our hearts with love by expressing
love for others in thought, word, and deed ("acting as if" until we make it
happen if necessary), that love can heal our own lives, help to solve our
problems, and enable us to feel good about ourselves.

John Marks Templeton
Worldwide Laws of Life

Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough,
money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them.
So, spread your love everywhere you go; first of all in your own home.
Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next-door neighbor.

Mother Teresa

I think love is the most misunderstood emotion in the universe.
I don't think half the people know what real love is. And I don't
think half the people on this planet have ever experienced it. If
people experienced for one moment what real love is, we could
never live the way we live with each other. We couldn't do to
each other what we're doing. We couldn't ignore what we're
ignoring. We couldn't allow it to be the way it is.

Neale Donald Walsch
Little Book of Life

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly
themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.
If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their
potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only
love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

Thomas Merton
No Man Is an Island

love - love 2 - love 3 - love 5 - love 6

As I grew up everybody told me who Miguel is, everybody told me what Miguel believes, what Miguel eats, and what Miguel does. Everybody had an opinion about Miguel. But everybody was a little different (and sometimes a lot different), so I had to adapt to all those different opinions and create an image that would satisfy everybody. That is how I created the image of Miguel, and I really believed that I was Miguel.

By creating the image of Miguel, I accumulated all the knowledge that my parents taught me, that my school taught me, that my brothers taught me, all of it. I learned from everyone about who I was, but the main thing that I learned from all of them was how to love. This ultimately became the biggest problem, because I learned how to love with conditions. I learned that I would be loved if I played by the rules, if I behaved, and if I loved the way they wanted me to love. If you're a good boy, Miguel, then I will love you. If not, I will reject you.

We learn that from the society around us, and in turn, that is how we love everybody. We love them if they let us control them. That is how we try to control each other all the time, but believe it or not, this isn't even the worst part. The worst part is that I learned to love myself the same way. I learned to love myself with conditions. The wisdom of the artist is that there is another way, and when we find it, we find our freedom.

Don Miguel Ruiz Jr.
Little Book of Wisdom

Love is not blind—it sees more, not less.
But because it sees more, it is willing to see less.

Julius Gordon

When success comes in the door, it seems,
love often goes out the window.

Joyce Brothers

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved.
I am not sure if you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence
is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech,
and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.

George Eliot

Where there is great love there are always miracles.

Willa Cather

Where there is no love, pour love in, and you will draw out love.

Juan de la Cruz

What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that
another person lives, acts, and experiences otherwise
than we do and crosswise to our purposes?

Friedrich Nietzsche

love - love 2 - love 3 - love 5 - love 6

The roots of love sink down and deep and strike out far, and they are
arteries that feed our lives, so we must see that they get the
water and sun they need so they can nourish us. And when you
put something good into the world, something good comes back to you.

Merle Shain

Do not be afraid to love. Remember dear old Don Quixote, viewing the
world with love. He saw many beautiful things no one else saw. Try being
dear Don Quixote for a day. You'll see that love improves your vision and
allows you to see more than your eye has ever seen before. But be
forewarned: Those who look on the world with love will need a handkerchief,
not to use as a blindfold, but to blow their nose and dry their tears.

Bernie Siegel

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who
really love: the more they give, the more they possess.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Don't shut love out of your life by saying it's impossible to find time.
The quickest way to receive love is to give; the fastest way
to lose love is to hold it too tightly; and the best way
to keep love is to give it wings.

Brian Dyson

A pious man came in lamentation to the great Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer.
His son had forsaken the religion of his people and the man was
grief-stricken. "What shall I do, Rabbi?" cried the father. "Do you love
your son?" the Rabbi asked. "Of course I do," said the man.
"Then, said the Rabbi, "love him even more."

traditional Chassidic Jewish story

Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to
be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired.

Mother Teresa

Using another as a means of satisfaction and security is not love.
Love is never security; love is a state in which there is
no desire to be secure; it is a state of vulnerability.

J. Krishnamurti

You want to be loved because you do not love; but the moment you love,
it is finished, you are no longer inquiring whether or not somebody loves you.

There is hunger for ordinary bread, and there is hunger for
love, for kindness, or thoughtfulness; and this is the great
poverty that makes people suffer so much.

Mother Teresa

I say that radiation is inherently disintegrative: it comes apart.
Gravity is inherently integrative: it pulls together. And to me,
there's a good possibility that love is what I'd call metaphysical
gravity. It really holds everything together.

R. Buckminster Fuller

While I generally find that great myths are great precisely because they
represent and embody great universal truths, the myth of romantic love
is a dreadful lie. Perhaps it is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival
of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage. But as a
psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and
suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of
energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives
conform to the unreality of the myth.

M. Scott Peck

And as we stray further from love, we multiply the words.
Had we remained together we could have become a silence.

Yehuda Amichai

We need to help people to discover the true meaning of love.
Love is generally confused with dependence. Those of us who
have grown in true love know that we can love only in
proportion to our capacity for independence.

Fred Rogers
The World According to Mr. Rogers

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Some time ago I read in a newspaper that according to the latest theories
love is born not in the heart but in the nose. When two people meet and
like each other, they start sending out little hormones whose name I don't
remember, but these hormones enter through the nostrils and ascend to the
brain, and there in some secret convolution they let loose the hurricane of
desire. In short, the article concluded, feelings are nothing but invisible
odors. What absurd nonsense! Anyone who's ever experienced true love,
love of the overmastering, indescribable kind, knows that assertions like these
represent just one more gauche attempt to belittle the workings of the heart.

Susanna Tamaro

I exist not to be loved and admired, but to love and act. It is not the
duty of those around me to love me. Rather, it is my duty to be
concerned about the world, about human beings.

Janusz Korczak

Upon the Sand
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

All love that has not friendship for its base
Is like a mansion built upon the sand.
Though brave its walls as any in the land,
And its tall turrets lift their heads in grace;
Though skilful and accomplished artists trace
Most beautiful designs on every hand,
And gleaming statues in dim niches stand,
And fountains play in some flow'r-hidden place:
Yet, when from the frowning east a sudden gust
Of adverse fate is blown, or sad rains fall,
Day in, day out, against its yielding wall,
Lo! the fair structure crumbles to the dust.
Love, to endure life's sorrow and earth's woe,
Needs friendship's solid mason-work below.

When two people meet and fall in love, there's a sudden rush of magic.
Magic is just naturally present then. We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic
without striving to make any more. One day we wake up and find that the
magic is gone. We hustle to get it back, but by then it's usually too late, we've
used it up. What we have to do is work like hell at making additional magic
right from the start. It's hard work, but if we can remember to do it, we
greatly improve our chances of making love stay.

Tom Robbins

If we have loved well while we were alive, there is life
after death here--our love will go on for generations.

Desmond Tutu
Believe

love - love 2 - love 3 - love 5 - love 6

I don’t know if I’ve learned anything yet! I did learn how to have a happy home, but I consider myself fortunate in that regard because I could’ve rolled right by it. Everybody has a superficial side and a deep side, but this culture doesn’t place much value on depth — we don’t have shamans or soothsayers, and depth isn’t encouraged or understood. Surrounded by this shallow, glossy society we develop a shallow side, too, and we become attracted to fluff. That’s reflected in the fact that this culture sets up an addiction to romance based on insecurity — the uncertainty of whether or not you’re truly united with the object of your obsession is the rush people get hooked on. I’ve seen this pattern so much in myself and my friends and some people never get off that line.

But along with developing my superficial side, I always nurtured a deeper longing, so even when I was falling into the trap of that other kind of love, I was hip to what I was doing. I recently read an article in Esquire magazine called ‘The End of Sex,’ that said something that struck me as very true. It said: “If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one.” What happens when you date is you run all your best moves and tell all your best stories — and in a way, that routine is a method for falling in love with yourself over and over.

You can’t do that with a longtime mate because he knows all that old material. With a long relationship, things die then are rekindled, and that shared process of rebirth deepens the love. It’s hard work, though, and a lot of people run at the first sign of trouble. You’re with this person, and suddenly you look like an asshole to them or they look like an asshole to you — it’s unpleasant, but if you can get through it you get closer and you learn a way of loving that’s different from the neurotic love enshrined in movies. It’s warmer and has more padding to it.

Joni Mitchell

From the spiritual side:

Love is not a word that describes my feelings; it is not a technique
by which I fulfill my needs; it is not an ideal, abstract and pure,
on which I meditate or discourse. It is acting in correspondence
with or in response to God in relation to persons.

Eugene H. Peterson

A life of love is difficult, but it is not a bleak or unrewarding life.
In fact, it is the only true human and happy life, for it is filled
with concerns that are as deep as life, as wide as the whole world,
and as far reaching as eternity. It is only when we have consented
to love, and have agreed to forget ourselves, that we can find
our fulfillment. This fulfillment will come unperceived and mysterious like
the grace of God, but we will recognize it and it will be recognized in us.

John Powell

Saying “Yes!” to God’s gift of love and life primarily and above all
means choosing love as a life principle. However, saying “Yes!” to God
is not a simple matter because making our lives into lives of love is not
a simple or easy thing. To choose love as a life principle means that
my basic mind-set or questions must be: What is the loving thing to be,
to do, to say? My consistent response to each of life’s events, to each
person who enters and touches my life, to each demand on my time and
nerves and heart, must somehow be transformed into an act of love.
However, in the last analysis, it is this “Yes!” that opens me to God.
Choosing love as a life principle widens the chalice of my soul, so that
God can pour into me his gifts and graces and powers.

John Powell

In all honesty, I may die of my illness, and I know that.
But the most important thing to me is to leave something
positive from it behind. Living, dying, physical healing,
and non-physical healing are not the issue. The ultimate
goal for me is to walk and live in the fullness of God’s
love, in such a way that it may be a healing for all.
To live is to love--nothing more and nothing less.
I finally learned this.

Susan (a cancer patient)

We are here to love, not to judge. I’d been blaming and raging. I certainly
wasn’t loving my daughter that afternoon as God loves me. God’s love doesn’t
insist on perfection or even good common sense. Why then should I demand
more of those I love? With this tiny change in perspective I began to see
the need for correction wasn’t in my daughter, but in me.

Susan L. Taylor

God, teach us to love without wanting to control; to love without limit;
to love you, our friends, and also our enemies. Teach us to be patient
in love when love is not returned; teach us to be patient when even
you are apparently far away. Teach us loving, waiting, patience when
there is no answer to our questionings and our doubt.

Michael Hollings and Etta Gullick