quotations and passages on love

One word frees us of all the weight
and pain of life: That word is love.

Sophocles

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

William Shakespeare

There is no surprise more
magical than the surprise
of being loved: it is God's
finger on a human being's
shoulder.

Charles Morgan

It is only the souls that do
not love that go empty
in this world.

Robert Hugh Benson

I love you
For the part of me
That you bring out;
I love you,
Not only for what you are,
But for what I am
When I am with you.

I love you,
Not only for what
You have made of yourself,
But for what
You are making of me.

I love you
For putting your hand
Into my heaped-up heart
And passing over
All the foolish, weak things
That you can't help
Dimly seeing there,
And for drawing out
Into the light
All the beautiful belongings
That no one else had looked
Quite far enough to find.

I love you because you
Are helping me to make
Of the lumber of my life
Not a tavern
But a temple;
Out of the works
Of my every day
Not a reproach
But a song. . .

Author unknown

Love is the greatest medicine. I ask to be healing medicine for others.
I ask my heart to expand its boundaries and to love others as they
wish to be loved. I ask my heart to expand its boundaries and
open to my being loved as I wish to be loved.

Julia Cameron

Where love is concerned, too much is not even enough.

Pierre-Augustin de Beaumarchais

Arthur Helps

Love, like the opening of the heavens to the saints, shows for a moment,
even to the dullest person, the possibilities of the human race.
One has faith, hope, and charity for another being,
perhaps but the creation of the imagination; still it is
a great advance for a person to be profoundly loving,
even in his or her imagination.

Love is the only service that power
cannot command and money cannot buy.

Anon

Hyla Brook

By June our brook's run out of song and speed.
Sought for much after that, it will be found
Either to have gone groping underground
(And taken with it all the Hyla breed
That shouted in the mist a month ago,
Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow)--
Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,
Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent
Even against the way its waters went.
Its bed is left a faded paper sheet
Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat--
A brook to none but who remember long.
This as it will be seen is other far
Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.
We love the things we love for what they are.

Robert Frost

Do not be afraid of showing your affection. Be warm and tender,
thoughtful and affectionate. People are more helped by sympathy,
than by service; love is more than money, and a kind word
will give more pleasure than a present.

John Lubbock

George Washington Carver

Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough.
Not only have I found that when I talk to the little flower
or to the little peanut they will give up their secrets,
but I have found that when I silently commune with people
they give up their secrets also--if you love them enough.

The truth is that there is only one terminal dignity--love. And the
story of a love is not important--what is important is that one is capable
of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.

Helen Hayes

Don't go changing to try and please me
You never let me down before
Don't imagine you're too familiar
And I don't see you anymore

I would not leave you in times of trouble
We never could have come this far
I took the good times, I'll take the bad times
I'll take you just the way you are

Don't go trying some new fashion
Don't change the color of your hair. . . .
I could not love you any better
I love you just the way you are

Billy Joel

True love's the gift which God has given
To humans alone beneath the heaven:
It is not fantasy's hot fire,
Whose wishes, soon as granted fly;
It liveth not in fierce desire,
With dead desire it doth not die;
It is the secret sympathy,
The silver link, the silken tie,
Which heart to heart and mind to mind
In body and in soul can bind.

Sir Walter Scott

We came here because the earth is abundant and alive--a rich, rich field
of lessons for us to learn. The lessons are not comfortable,
because if we weren't challenged, it would mean that we didn't need
to learn these lessons of the soul: courage, patience, faith, learning to love,
embracing eternal life, and the most magical lesson of all: It's not what I do,
it's knowing I am. We are here to learn about love, to let others love us,
to discover that love is a living force--real, broad, encompassing.
I have also learned that universal love is there for me,
and will be there for me, if I'm open to it and believe in it.

Melody Beattie

Love is easily one of God's greatest gifts to us--as Diane Warren says in her song "You Were Loved": "You'll hold this world's most priceless thing / The greatest gift this life can bring / If you can look back and know / You were loved." But we tend to forget that in order to be loved, we must love. We must learn to love unconditionally, and the gift of love includes so many other elements that it's impossible to list them all: tolerance, forgiveness, gratitude, acceptance, giving, taking.

In his book The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm calls love an art, and as with any art, he says that it must be cultivated, cared for, learned. It doesn't come naturally to us--we must develop our capacity to love. It's not that squishy feeling inside that makes us so nervous when we meet that "special someone"--that feeling wears off eventually, leaving us wondering "what happened?"

How often do we have to hear wise people tell us that love is more than something that we "fall" into? Can we read Paul's words about love in Corinthians (see first Love page) and actually live out those ideas, making them a part of how we act and how we treat others? I hope so. I have to admit, I'm not all that good at it yet, but I'm working at it. I hope that someday I have some wise words of my own to add to the subject. . .

tdw

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Everything we love, no doubt, will pass away,
perhaps tomorrow, perhaps thousands of years later.
Neither it nor our love for it is any the less valuable for that reason.

John Passmore

You are as prone to love as the sun is to shine;
it being the most delightful and natural employment
of the soul of humans.

Thomas
Traherne

Familiar acts are beautiful through love.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

We are shaped and fashioned
by what we love.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Things are beautiful
if you love them.

Jean Anouilh

Caroline Norton

Until I truly loved, I was alone.

In wise love each divines the high secret self of the other,
and, refusing to believe in the mere daily self, creates a mirror
where the lover or beloved sees an image to copy in daily life.

William Butler Yeats

Just as energy begets energy, so,
I have discovered, love begets love.

Tom Sullivan

Age does not protect you from love.
But love, to some extent,
protects you from age.

Jeanne Moreau

We must evolve for all human conflict a method
which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation.
The foundation of such a method is love.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

One word frees us from all the weight
and pain of life: That word is Love.

Sophocles

It's not the length but the quality of life that matters to me.
It has always been important to me to write one sentence at a time,
to live every day as if it were my last and judge it in those terms,
often badly, not because it lacked grand gesture or grand passion
but because it failed in the daily virtues of self-discipline,
kindness, and laughter. It is love, very ordinary, human love,
and not fear, which is the good teacher and the wisest judge.

Jane Rule

There are two kinds of faithfulness in love:
one is based on forever finding new things to love
in the loved one; the other is based on our pride in being faithful.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Let us have love and more love; a love that melts all opposition,
a love that conquers all foes, a love that sweeps away all barriers,
a love that aboundeth in charity, a large-heartedness, tolerance,
forgiveness and noble striving, a love that triumphs over all obstacles.

Abdul Baha

There isn't any secret formula or method. You learn love by loving--
by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.

Aldous Huxley

Love is the air that I breathe, like oxygen. When I lack it, I feel atrophied,
asphyxiated. When I have it, I feel I am growing. And so this growth is linked
to others, or to a collective other. If I realize that I do not love you,
my faith diminishes, and I breathe less and less of the oxygen of life.
When I feel linked to you, in communion with you, there is a current of love
that passes between us, and the intensity can multiply. And the more
this love grows, the more the faith becomes luminous, the more I feel
linked to the collective other. I am speaking of God.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide

The Greek New Testament word for this overflowing divine love is agape. . .
God's own love spontaneously to all creatures, not by reason of their worth or merit,
not moved by any gain for himself, not caused by any external force or value,
but coming freely from his boundless generosity.

Paul. E Johnson

Love has a hem to her garment that reaches to the very dust.
It sweeps the stains from the streets and lanes, and because it can, it must.

Mother Teresa

Love is the supreme value around which all moral values can be integrated into one ethical system valid for the whole of humanity.

Pitirim A Sorokin

Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable:
namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction
of material forces into the light of ideal goods.

George Santayana

Love is extravagant in the price it is willing to pay, the time it is willing to give,
the hardships it is willing to endure, and the strength it is willing to spend.
Love never thinks in terms of "how little," but always in terms of "how much."
Love gives, love knows, and love lasts.

Joni Eareckson Tada

Let every creature have your love. Love, with its fruits of meekness, patience,
and humility, is all that we can wish for ourselves and our fellow creatures.
For this is to live in God, united with Him, both for time and eternity. To desire
to communicate good to everyone, in the degree that we can and to which
each person is capable of receiving from us, is a divine temper, for thus
God stands unchangeably disposed towards the whole creation.

William Law

Love is a force. . . . It is not a result; it is a cause. It is not a product.
It is a power, like money, or steam or electricity. It is valueless
unless you can give something else by means of it.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Love is a way of seeing and a way of being that honors God
in everyone we meet. And it changes us in the most
fundamental way. All we need to do is welcome the challenge
of our relationships, training our eyes to look beyond human
behavior to the Presence within. When we seek to live love, we discover
through our interactions with others the divinity within ourselves.

Susan L. Taylor