love 2 - love 3 - love 4 - love 5

Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it.
Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals,
love the plants, love everything. If you love everything,
you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it,
you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will
come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.

Feodor Dostoevsky

Though I speak with the tongues of people and of angels, but have not love,
I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have
the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge,
and though I have faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love,
I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor,
and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.

Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy;
love does not parade itself, is not puffed up;
does not behave rudely, does not seek its own,
is not provoked, thinks no evil;
does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth;
bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things.
   Love never fails.

The Apostle Paul
I Corinthians 13, 1-8

George Eliot

Whoever loves much, does much.

Thomas a Kemper

Talk not of wasted affection, affection never was wasted;
If it enrich not the heart of another, its waters, returning 
Back to their springs, like the rain, shall fill them full of refreshment;
That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Guy de Maupassant

To love very much is to love inadequately; we love--that is all.
Love cannot be modified without being nullified.
Love is a short word but it contains everything. Love means the body,
the soul, the life, the entire being. We feel love as we feel the warmth of our blood,
we breathe love as we breathe the air, we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts.
Nothing more exists for us. Love is not a word; it is a wordless state indicated by four letters.

Helen Keller

I remember the morning that I first asked the meaning of the word "love. . . ."
Miss Sullivan put her arm gently round me and spelled into my hand, "I love Helen."
   "What is love?" I asked. . . .
   "Love is something like the clouds that were in the sky before the sun came out," she replied. . . .
"You cannot touch the clouds, you know; but you feel the rain and know how glad the flowers
and the thirsty earth are to have it after a hot day. You cannot touch love either;
but you feel the sweetness that it pours into everything.
Without love you would not be happy or want to play."
   The beautiful truth burst upon my mind--I felt that these were invisible lines
stretched between my spirit and the spirits of others.

There is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first consciousness of love--
the first fluttering of its silken wings--the first rising sound and breath of that wind
which is so soon to sweep through the soul, to purify or destroy.

Love is everything.

Jane Siberry

Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved."
Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love."
Immature love says: "I love you because I need you."
Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."

Erich Fromm

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Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live.

Robert Southwell

Thomas a Kempis

Love for God is the farthest reach of all stations,
the sun of the highest degrees, and there is no station
after that of love, except its fruit and its consequences.

Al-Ghazzali

Love is the great transformer, turning ambition into aspiration,
selfishness into service, greed into gratitude,
getting into giving and demands into dedication.

anonymous

Ethel Barrymore

When you give away some of the light from the candle,
by lighting another person's candle there isn't less light
because you've given some away--there's more.
That works with love, too.

anonymous

Agape means love for another self not because of any lovable qualities
which he or she may possess, but purely and entirely because
it is a self capable of experiencing happiness and misery
and endowed with the power to choose between good and evil.
The love of humans is thus more than a feeling, it is a state of the will.

Obert C. Tanner

Marlene Dietrich

How terrible when people are led to believe, or left to believe,
that once they are in love they have nothing to do but live
happily ever after, they have nothing further to learn.

Gerald Vann