another page of passages and quotations about love

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Of course love is never earned.
It is a grace we give one another.
Anything we need to earn is only approval.

Rachel Naomi Remen

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

The secret of improved plant breeding, apart from scientific knowledge,
is love. While I was conducting experiments to make spineless cacti,
I often talked to the plants. . . . "You have nothing to fear," I would tell
them. "You don't need your defensive thorns. I will protect you."
Gradually the useful plant of the desert emerged in a thornless variety.

Luther Burbank

You must act in your friend's interest whether it pleases
your friend or not; the object of love is to serve, not to win.

Woodrow Wilson

When you commit yourself to living love, you feel at peace with yourself
because you are at harmony with the flow of life. Viewing life from the highest
perspective, you feel confident and secure. You realize that no matter how
things may appear, you are loved and protected. You know you are one with
God, and you bring your peace with you wherever you go. You’re not
looking for love, but for opportunities to love.

Susan L. Taylor

Love's way of dealing with us is different from conscience's way. Conscience commands; love inspires. What we do out of love, we do because we want to.

Arnold Joseph Toynbee

When love fills your life all limitations are gone.
The medicine this sick world needs so badly is love.

Peace Pilgrim

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves,
and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love
only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

Thomas Merton

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

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps
the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last
test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The way to heaven is within. Shake the wings of love--when love's wings have become strong,
there is no need to trouble about a ladder.

Jalil al-Din Rumi

I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.

Mother Teresa

Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch,
but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same.

Helen Keller

The first duty of love is to listen.

Paul Tillich

The true Light is a gentle love which, rising in you, causes you to
look on the world with understanding and compassion and respect.
When you respect the souls of your brother and sister, you respect
their lives in every way. This gentle spirit, this respect one for
another, must come. For this is the generation of the one true Light,
and this true light is that of love.

White Eagle

God looks at the world through the eyes of love. If we, therefore, as human beings made
in the image of God also want to see reality rationally, that is, as it truly is, then we,
too, must learn to look at what we see with love.

Roberta Bondi

There are no different categories of love. There isn't
one kind of love between a mother and child, another
between lovers, and another between friends. The love
that is real is the love that lies at the heart of all
relationships. That is the love of God and it doesn't
change with form or circumstance.

Marianne Williamson

The most wonderful inspirational chemistry we can use on another
is the gift of our love and acceptance. Devoted and unquestioned
love has a magic creative power. The consciousness of being loved
is an uplifting, saving, healing force that causes one to go on when
otherwise it would be impossible to do so.
"Love," said Emerson, "is the affirmative of affirmatives."

Wilferd A. Peterson

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

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

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 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 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

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 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

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

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

We cage a bird for our own pleasure. We do not cage the bird for its
pleasure. That is not the highest love for the bird. The highest love
for all things is for us a literal source of life. The more things in the
world of Nature to which we can give the higher love, the more of their
natural love and life shall we get in return. So, as we grow, refine and
increase this power of recognizing and loving the bird, the animal, the
insect or, in other words, the Infinite in all things, we shall receive a love,
a renewed life, strength, vigour, cheer and inspiration from not only these,
but the falling snow-flake, the driving rain, the cloud, the sea, the
mountain. And this will not be a mere sentiment, but a great means for
recuperating and strengthening the body, for this strengthens the spirit
with a strength which comes to stay, and what strengthens the spirit
must strengthen the body. We cannot make of ourselves this capacity
for so loving and drawing strength from all things. It is our belonging,
but must be demanded of the Supreme Power.

Prentice Mulford

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Let us, then, try what love will do, for if people once see we love them,
we should soon find that they would not harm us. . . . force may subdue,
but love gains; and they who forgive first, win the laurel.

William Penn

In real love you want the other person's good.
In romantic love you want the other person.

Margaret Anderson

The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be,
(b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be
transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. We waste time looking
for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.

Tom Robbins

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the
barriers that you have built against it.

A Course in Miracles

It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state
of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls into
despair at the first onslaught of affliction.

Simone Weil

We use the word "love" but we have no more understanding of love than we do of anger or fear or jealousy or even joy, because we have seldom investigated what that state of mind is. What are the feelings we so quickly label as love? For many what is called love is not lovely at all but is a tangle of needs and desires, of momentary ecstasies and bewilderment. Moments of unity, of intense feelings of closeness, occur in a mind so fragile that the least squint or sideways glance shatters its oneness into a dozen ghostly paranoias.

When we say love we usually mean some emotion, some deep feeling for an object or person, that momentarily allows us to open to another. But in such emotional love, self-protection is never very far away. Still there is "business" to the relationship: clouds of jealousy, possessiveness, guilt, intentional and unintentional manipulation, separateness, and the shadow of all previous "loves" darkens the light of oneness.

But what I mean by love is not an emotion, it is a state of being. True love has no object. Many speak of their unconditional love for another. Unconditional love is the experience of being; there is no "I" and "other," and anyone or anything it touches is experienced in love. You cannot unconditionally love someone. You can only be unconditional love. It is not a dualistic emotion. It is a sense of oneness with all that is. The experience of love arises when we surrender our separateness into the universal. It is a feeling of unity. You don't love another, you are another. There is no fear because there is no separation.

Stephen Levine

Oh, you who are trying to learn the marvel of Love through the copy book
of reason, I'm very much afraid that you will never really see the point.

Hafiz of Shiraz

One stands perplexed and wonders whether one should use force or humble love.
Always decide to use humble love! If you resolve on that once and for all,
you may subdue the whole world.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Eskimos have fifty-two names for snow because it was
important to them; there ought to be as many for love.

Margaret Atwood

Love that ends is the shadow of love; true love is without beginning or end.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

Love doesn't suit the lazy; sometimes it requires strong, precise actions.

Susanna Tamaro