quotes, quotations and passages on love

love 2 - love 3 - love 4 - love 5 - love 6

What the world needs now is love, sweet love;
It's the only thing that there's just too little of.

Bacharach/David

Surely it is not true blessedness to be free from sorrow while there is sorrow and sin in the worlds; sorrow is then a part of love, and love does not seek to throw it off. George Eliot

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward in the same direction. Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Take away love and our earth is a tomb. Robert Browning

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

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved;
loved for ourselves, or rather loved in spite of ourselves.

Victor Hugo

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Whoever loves much, does much.

Thomas a Kempis

To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the
positive--to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy,
fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness
we did not know was possible before.

Rollo May

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

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.

Helen Keller

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

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.

Guy de Maupassant

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.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

All you need in the world is love and laughter. That's all anyone
needs. To have love in one hand and laughter in the other.

August Wilson

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

Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle,
a higher tax bracket, or a holding pattern over Philadelphia.

Judith Viorst

The only way to speak the truth is to speak lovingly.

Henry David Thoreau

Love is everything.

Jane Siberry

If our heart goes out in love to all with whom we come in contact,
we inspire love and the same ennobling and warming influences of
love always return to us from those in whom we inspire them. There
is a deep scientific principle underlying the precept — If you would
have all the world love you, you must first love all the world.

Ralph Waldo Trine
"Thoughts I Met on the Highway"

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

Robert Southwell

It is essential that our love be liberating, not possessive. We must at all
times give those we love the freedom to be themselves. Love affirms the other
as other. It does not possess and manipulate another as mine. . . . To love is
to liberate. Love and friendship must empower those we love to become
their best selves, according to their own lights and visions.

John Powell

Love is swift, sincere, pious, pleasant, generous,
strong, patient, faithful, prudent, long-suffering,
and never seeking her own; for wheresoever people
seek their own, there they fall from love.

Thomas a Kempis

love 2 - love 3 - love 4 - love 5 - love 6

Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun
like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that
person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.

Fred Rogers
The World According to Mr. Rogers

Never in the world does hatred cease by hatred; hatred ceases by love.

the Buddha

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

Sophocles

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

unattributed

You must learn day by day, year by year to broaden your horizon.
The more things you love, the more you are interested in,
the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about--
the more you have left when anything happens.

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.

unattributed

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

Love for the joy of loving, and not for the offerings
of someone else's heart.

Marlene Dietrich

You must act in your friends' interests whether it pleases
them or not; the object of love is to serve, not to win.

Woodrow Wilson

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

The injunction that we should love our neighbors as ourselves
means to us equally that we should love ourselves
as we love our neighbors.

Barbara Deming

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For one human being to love another human being: that is
perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us,
the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which
all other work is merely preparation.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I will greet this day with love in my heart.

And how will I do this? Henceforth will I look on all things with love and
I will be born again. I will love the sun for it warms my bones; yet I will
love the rain for it cleanses my spirit. I will love the light for it shows me
the way; yet I will love the darkness for it shows me the stars. I will
welcome happiness for it enlarges my heart; yet I will endure sadness
for it opens my soul. I will acknowledge rewards for they are my due;
yet I will welcome obstacles for they are my challenge.

Og Mandino
The Greatest Salesman in the World

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able
to say to him or her, "What are you going through?"

Simone Weil

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

love 2 - love 3 - love 4 - love 5 - love 6

When we love another, we never ever seek to limit or restrict
them in any way whatsoever. Love says, "My will for you is
your will for you." Love says, "I choose for you what you choose
for you." When I say, "I choose for you what I choose for you,"
then I'm not loving you. I'm loving me through you, because I'm
getting what I want, rather than seeing you get what you want.

Neale Donald Walsch
Little Book of Life

This is an eternal and fundamental principle, inherent in all things, in every
system of philosophy, in every religion and in every science. There is no
getting away from the law of love. It is feeling that imparts vitality to
thought. Feeling is desire, and desire is love. Thought
impregnated with love becomes invincible.

Charles Haanel

Because the word "love" is often loosely used to describe a variety of feelings and relationships, it can be easy to become confused about love's real meaning. Society today tends to define love as a romantic expression for someone of the opposite sex. But it's possible to think of love in much broader terms: the basic feeling of goodwill for another, care for their health and well-being, and the desire to have only good come to them. This includes our parents, siblings, friends, and everyone!

Love is the ideal and the dream, in some manner of expression, of every person who lives, for in the Creator's Love were our souls conceived and in Love lies our destiny to express. We are fulfilled when we are in the state of love, and somehow emptied without it. Love becomes the purpose of our being alive when we sprang from the celestial womb. Although there have been billions of words written about love in its many expressions, not one--or all--of them can fully capture the essence of love.

Sometimes when we think we know someone, we're actually loving what we think the other person may be able to give us. This can be an aspect of "conditional" love. Love at its highest level demands nothing in return. It loves for the sake of loving. It is not concerned with what or whom it loves, nor is it concerned with whether or not love is returned. Like the sun, its joy is in the shining forth of its nature.

Love is an inner quality that sees good everywhere and in everybody. It insists that all is good, and by refusing to see anything but good, it tends to cause that quality to appear uppermost in itself and in other things. Love takes no notice of faults, imagined or otherwise. Love is considered the great harmonizer and healer in life.

John Marks Templeton
Worldwide Laws of Life

But not for another twenty years would I understand that the vibration in my grandparents' house was love. That is a conceptual understanding that had to be guided by an intuition, which then was nourished by a lot of reading and reflection. My grandparents were in love. They loved each other. They loved their children and grandchildren, and were loved in return, though probably not quite as much. Their children loved one another, the way sisters and brothers do. My grandfather and grandmother loved God, each in his or her own special and sometimes peculiar ways; and their love for God was reciprocated, in some graceful proportion.

It was not my grandparents' love for each other, or for their children, or for me, that made the air hum in the twilight. No particular expression or impression of love caused that vibration, but love itself, ever so briefly made perceptible. Love sounded a chord now and again, this chord of intense pleasure tinged with melancholy, to remind me that all of the component notes had been ringing there for generations. In visual terms, it was like noticing all at once that the rainbow of colors flowing from a prism is derived from a ray of pure sunlight.

Daniel Mark Epstein

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

To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the
reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity.
Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.

Thomas Merton

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

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

Perhaps the greatest gift we can give to another human being is
detachment. Attachment, even that which imagines it is selfless,
always lays some burden on the other person. How to learn
to love in such a light, airy way that there is no burden?

May Sarton
Journal of a Solitude