the faces of love
We live in a time when the Infinitely Faceted Eternal Answer to all question and conflict is more sorely needed to be known and lived than ever before in the history of our world.
Unto that aspiration these pages are dedicated.
In lieu of attempting to categorize so immense a subject, entries have been listed in simple alphabetical order.
TO
the Shining One by whose Grace it was inspired
A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand…I tried to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the of the murders. But I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary, ordinary naked love. It’s the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It’s everything we are capable of against horror and loss and tragedy. It’s what makes me believe that we are not fools to believe in God. It’s to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them, like seeds that open only in a great fire. To believe that who we are persists past what we were. To believe against evil evidence hourly, that love is why we are here. An unidentified priest on NIGHTLINE
A friend is someone who knows the song of your heart and can sing it back to you when you’ve forgotten the words.
A friend is, as it were, a second self. Cicero
A good deed is never lost; he who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love. St. Basil
A hallmark and curse of being profoundly in love is the seeming desperate inability fully to communicate to the Beloved all that one so deeply wishes to convey.
A little kindness from person to person is better than a vast love for all humankind. Richard Dehmel
A single action that we make for our own appropriateness is always the perfect appropriate action for the totality of everything when the intelligence of the heart is active. Joseph Chilton Pearce
Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and blows up the bonfire. François Duc de La Rochefoucauld
Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great.
Comte de Bussy-Rabnutin
All anguish is based on an existential anguish which is nothing other than the fear of contingent being separated from the totality. . . And now let me add that just as there is an existential anguish at the root of all anguish, so there is an existential longing at the root of all longing. This is the love of contingent being for the totality, the love of the part for the whole, the love of the creature for the creator. William Johnston
All flowers talk to me and so do hundreds of little living things in the woods. I learn what I know by watching and loving everything. George Washington Carver
All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Tolstoy
Ama et fac quod vis. St. Augustine
An act of love that fails is just as much a part of the divine life as an act of love that succeeds, for love is measured by fullness, not by reception. Herold Loukes
And a new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one for another. Jesus the Christ
And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you. Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children; and walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us. Ephesians. 4:32-5:2
And if you desire to have this intent to reach God summarized in one word, take but a little word of one syllable. And such a word is Love – and fasten this word to your heart so it may never go away no matter what befalls you. And if any thought presses on you to ask what you would have, answer with just this one word. THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING
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.
George Washington Carver
As you walk, you cut open and create that riverbed into which the stream of your descendants shall enter and flow. . . and I strive to discover how to signal my companions. . . to say in time a simplest word, a password, like conspirators: Let us unite, let us hold each other tightly, let us merge our hearts, let us create for Earth a brain and a heart, let us give a human meaning to the superhuman struggle. Nikos Kazantzakis
Attachment to things is a clear sign of lack of love in one’s life.
Be kind: Most everyone is fighting a hard battle.
Beauty without the Beloved is a sword through the heart. Rossetti
Before the universe can merge into one, two souls must merge as one. Pir Vilayat Khan
Being human is not genetic. We make our children human by loving them.
Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. St. John
Blow O wind to where my Beloved is. Touch him and return to touch me soon. I will feel his gentle caress through you and meet his beauty in the moon. These things are much for the one who loves. One can live by them alone: that he and I breathe the same air and that the Earth we tread is one. Ramayana
Compassion, love, and forgiveness are not luxuries. They are fundamental for our survival.
XIV Dalai Lama
Creation was for the purpose of lovemaking. As long as there was only one-ness, there was no delight. But when division occurred and afterwards they were connected with one another, this brought about great delight. Reb. Hayim Haikel
Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even more. Erica Jong
Don’t be afraid to love. Do not be afraid to love men, women, the very young, the very old, animals, plants, sudden acquaintances, lifelong friends, your children, your parents, strangers, yourself. Love is affirmation. You are God. Give us your blessing. Paul Williams
Don’t scold the lover. The “wrong” way he talks is better than a hundred “right” ways of others. Rumi
Embrace all things in Love, yet do not possess. Master H
Engage in spontaneous acts of kindness and radical acts of love.
Even if it’s a little thing, do something for those who have need of a man’s help, something for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it. For, remember, you don’t live in a world all your own. Your brothers and sisters are here too. Albert Schweitzer
Every action is either one of love, or a call for love. A COURSE IN MIRACLES
Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people. . . We are a part of the earth and it is a part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man, all belong to the same family. . .We love the earth as a newborn loves its mother's heartbeat. So, if we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it. Care for it as we have cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you receive it. Preserve the land for all children and love it, as God loves us all. As we are part of the land, you too are part of the land. This earth is precious to us. It is also precious to you. One thing we know: there is only one God. No man, be he red or white, can be apart. We are brothers after all. Chief Seattle
Everyone, thing, and situation is an opportunity to love. Some make it easy and some make it difficult. But we are occasionally blessed with a special encounter, momentary or lasting, which profoundly expands and refines our capacity to love without the slightest effort on our part. Such Grace deserves our deepest gratitude and attention.
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. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating hearts, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is – solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves. Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things. Rainer Maria Rilk
For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. Carl Sagan
For some, we love God with the kind of unconditional love that parents have for their children, and others describe it as the kind of companionable love best friends have for one another, that unflinching loyalty, and others describe it as the kind of love you have for the lover you are not married to, because married love is condoned by society, but the love of God is riskier than that, and it requires that we risk everything for the love of the beloved. Dianna Eck
For this is wrong, if anything is wrong: not to enlarge the freedom of a love with all the inner freedom one can summon. We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it. Rainer Maria Rilke
Friendship is a horizon - which expands whenever we approach it. E. R. Hazlip
Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity. Kahlil Gibran
Friendship is not necessary. Like philosophy, like art. . . it has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival. C. S. Lewis
Friendship is perfect when virtuous men love the good in one another, for virtue gives more delight than beauty, and is untouched by time. Mary Renault
Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It's not something you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything. Muhammad Ali
Friendship is the highest degree of perfection in society. Montaingne
Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words. George Eliot
Friendship was given to us by nature as the handmaid of virtue. . . because virtue cannot attain her highest aims unattended, but only in union and fellowship with another. Such a partnership as this. . . should be considered the best and happiest comradeship along the road to nature’s highest good. Aristotle
Friendship vows toward immortality
And does not know the passing away of beauty.
Though take care!
Many years ago through loss I learned
That love is wrung from our inmost heart
Until only the Beloved is and we are not.
THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH
From my own limited experience I have found that the greatest inner tranquility comes from the development of love and compassion. The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater our own sense of well-being. It is the ultimate source of success in life. This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness. XIV Dalai Lama
God is all love. Only humans are judgmental and discriminating. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. St. John
God is Love. His plan for creation can be rooted only in Love. Every saint who has penetrated to the core of Reality has testified that a divine universal plan exists and that it is beautiful and full of joy. Paramahansa Yogananda
Gratitude goes hand in hand with love, and where one is the other must be found.
A COURSE IN MIRACLES
He who abides in friendship abides in God, and God in him. God is friendship.
Saint Aelred of Rievaulx
He whom love touches not walks in darkness. Plato
Him that I love, I wish to be free - even from me. Anne Lindberg
Home is not a dwelling. It is a place of welcome within the heart of the Beloved. Not to know the sweet comfort of this gracious space is forever to wander in exile and homesickness.
How do I love thee? Le me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and
height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s
faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints – I love thee with the
breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! – and, if God
choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination. Keats
I believe that every single event in life happens in an opportunity to choose love over fear.
Oprah Winfrey
I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge
That myth is more potent than history
That dreams are more powerful than facts
That hope always triumphs over experience
And I believe that love is stronger than death.
Robert Fulgham
I define love thus: The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. M. Scott Peck
I don't want to live. I want to love first, and live incidentally. Zelda Fitzgerald
I have known lovers
Cherry-bloom – the nightingale –
I will sleep content.
I have loved Thee with two loves, a selfish love and a love that is worthy of Thee. As for the love which is selfish, I occupy myself therein with remembrance of Thee to the exclusion of all others. As for that which is worthy of Thee, therein Thou raisest the veil that I may see Thee. Rabi’a al-Adawiya
I have made a great discovery. What I love belongs to me. Not the chairs and tables in my house, but the masterpieces of the world. It is only a question of loving them enough. Elizabeth Asquith Bibesco
I hear the ringing of bells that no one has shaken,
In Love there is more joy than we can know,
Rain pours down, although the sky is cloudless,
There are whole rivers of light,
The universe is shot through in all parts by a single shaft
of Love.
There are few who know It fully,
They are blind who hope to see It by the light of reason.
How blessed is Kabir: His is the music of one soul
meeting another;
His songs are about the forgetting of sorrows.
Kabir
I know of only one duty, and that is to love. Albert Camus
I offer you peace. I offer you love. I offer you friendship. I see your beauty. I hear your need. I feel your feelings. My wisdom flows from the Highest Source. I salute that Source in you. Let us work together for unity and love. Gandhi
I tell you the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people. Vincent Van Gogh
I think that in every human mind, possibly from an extremely early age, there exists a continually growing and continually more subtle complex of expectation and hope; an aggregation of lovely and exciting thoughts; conceptions of encounter and reaction picked up from observation, descriptions, drama; reveries of sensuous delights and ecstasies; reveries of understanding and reciprocity; which I will call the Lover-Shadow. . . I think it is almost as essential in our lives as our self consciousness. It is other consciousness. . . It is the inseparable correlative to the persona, in the direction of our lives. . . when we are in love it means that we have found in someone the presentation of the promise of some, at least, of the main qualities of our Lover-Shadow. The beloved person is for a time identified with the dream – attains a vividness that captures the role, and seems to leave anything outside it unilluminated. H. G. Wells
I think that it is our privilege and felicity to love God for his beauty…I think that one may contribute (every so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one’s own life and environment beautiful, so far as one’s power reaches. Robinson Jeffers
I went to the garden of love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this chapel were shut,
And THOU SHALT NOT writ over the door;
So I turned to the garden of love,
That so many sweet flowers bore,
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be –
And priests in black gowns were walking
their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
William Blake
If you knew how much God loves you, you would die of Joy. Paramahansa Yogananda
If love is sharing, how can you find it except through itself? Offer it and it will come to you, because it is drawn to itself. A COURSE IN MIRACLES
If the world ended today, would you be at peace with the amount of love you shared?
If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship, we must love friends for their sake rather than for our own. Charlotte Bronte
If you ever want to touch the hand and heart of God. . . you can do it through the body of someone you love. Theodore Sturgeon
If you have love in your life, it can make up for a great many things that are missing. If you don't have love in your life, no matter what else there is, it's not enough. Ann Landers
In doing something, do it with love or never do it at all. Gandhi
In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have been had they been loved.
That nothing cures.
Philip Larkin
In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love. Marc Chagall
It happens all the time in heaven,
And some day
It will begin to happen
Again on earth –
That men and women who are married,
And men and men who are
Lovers,
And women and women who give each other
Light,
Often will get down on their knees
And while so tenderly
Holding their lover’s hand,
With tears in their eyes,
Will sincerely speak, saying,
“Dearest One,
How can I be more loving to you;
How can I be more
Kind?”
Hafiz
It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.
It is a little embarrassing that, after 45 years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other. Aldous Huxley
It is better to embrace the world in love, than to come to God in fear.
It is in fact a great consolation in this life to have someone to whom you can be united in the intimate embrace of the most sacred love; in whom your spirit can rest; to whom you can pour out your soul; in whose delightful company, as in a sweet consoling song, you can take comfort in the midst of sadness; in whose most welcome friendly bosom you can find peace in so many worldly setbacks; to whose loving heart you can open as freely as you would to yourself your innermost thoughts; through whose spiritual kisses – as by some medicine – you are cured of the sickness of care and worry; who weeps with you in sorrow, rejoices with you in joy, and wonders with you in doubt; who you draw by the bonds of love into that inner room of your soul, so that though the body is absent, the spirit is there, and you can confer all alone, the more secretly, the more delightfully; with whom you can rest, just the two of you, in the sleep of peace away from the noise of the world, in the embrace of love, in the kiss of unity with the sweetness of the Holy Spirit flowing over you; to whom you so join and unite yourself that you mix soul with soul, and two become one. St. Aelred of Rievaulx
It is not an act of love to love someone romantically who does not love you in the same way.
It is not how much we do, but how much love we put into the doing. Mother Therese
It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship. Henry Ward Beecher
It is only by feeling your love that the poor will forgive you for the gifts of bread. St. Vincent de Paul
It is only fear you will add if you prepare yourself for love. A COURSE IN MIRACLES
It is only in the mysterious logic of love that reason can be found. John Nash
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; that which is essential is invisible to the eye. Saint-Exupéry
It is the nature of love to look upon only the truth, for there it sees itself. A COURSE IN MIRACLES
It’s amazing, Molly, all the love within - you take it with you. Sam in GHOST
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 wand’ring bark,
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.
Shakespeare
Let no one who loves be called unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow. Sir James Matthew Barrie
Life is a training ground for loving. On the path of loving the challenge of life is to unempower the voice of fear and to use all the events of your life to love and to learn. Frank Andrews
Life is short and it hurts. Love is the only drug that works. John Coit
Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind. Henri Frederick
Life is short. To love is all there is time for.
Life leads the thoughtful man on a path of many windings. Now the course is checked, now it runs straight again. Here winged thoughts may pour freely forth in words, there the heavy burden of knowledge must be shut away in silence. But when to people are at one in their inmost hearts, they shatter even the strength of iron or of bronze. And when two people understand each other in their inmost hearts, their words are sweet and strong, like the fragrance of orchid. I CHING
Longing: Two souls, eternally bound together, to meet in this world and recognize, but to part, never to meet again.
Looking back, I have this to regret. . . that too often when I loved, I did not say so. David Grayson
Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable. C. S. Lewis
Love becomes perfect only when it transcends itself, becoming One with its object, producing Unity of Being. Hakim Jami
Love can be increased only through sharing.
Love conquers all things; let us too surrender to love. Virgil
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. Rainer Maria Rilke
Love cures people, both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it. Karl Menninger
Love does not die easily. It is a living thing. It thrives in the face of all of life's hazards, save one - neglect. James D. Bryden
Love gives itself, it is not bought. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Love has no cost. It is a gift that is freely given and received. A COURSE IN MIRACLES
Love has to spring spontaneously from within. It is no way amenable to any form of inner or outer force. Love and coercion can never go together, but though Love cannot be forced on another, it can be awakened in him through Love itself. Love is essentially self communicative. Those who do not have it catch it from those who have it. True Love is unconquerable and irresistible, and it goes gathering power and spreading itself until eventually it transforms everyone whom it touches. Meher Baba
Love increases forever. It extends always outward because it cannot be contained.
Love is a chain of Love. When we love one thing, we love another. Truman Capote
Love is a condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
Robert Heinlein
Love is a kind of divine madness, Plato said. . . (however, this madness) is not pathological, but more an opening into eternity. It is a relief from the stringent limits of pragmatic, sanitized life. It is a door that opens out from human reason into divine mystery. Thomas Moore
Love is about bonding, not bondage. Fr. Charles Moore
Love is affirmation.
Jealously, possessiveness are doubt.
Jealousy and possessiveness have nothing to do
with Love.
Every act of Love should be cause for joy in
every person who is aware of it.
Paul Williams
Love is an infinite Sea. . .
Know that it is the waves of Love
that turn the wheels of Heaven:
Without Love, nothing in the world
would have life.
Every single atom is drunk on
this Perfection and runs towards It. . .
Rumi
Love is a terrific shortcut to some very profound places. Two people can sometimes discover something that one can't alone. Paul Monette
Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes. Nietzsche
Love is extension. To withhold even the smallest gift is not to know love’s purpose. Love offers everything forever. A COURSE IN MIRACLES
Love is freedom. To look for it by placing yourself in bondage is to separate yourself from it. A COURSE IN MIRACLES
Love is like a flame; when it burns it is visible to all.
Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it, and it darts away.
Dorothy Parker
Love is not an emotion. Love is not a sentiment. Love
is the ultimate truth of the heart of creation.
Deepak Chopra
Love is not blind - It sees more and not less, but because it sees more, it is willing to see less. Will Moss
Love is not longing, it is fulfillment.
Love is nothing else than the spiritual union of the soul with the object loved. St. Aquinas
Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions. Woody Allen
Love is the answer. Now what was the question?
Love is the beauty of the soul. St. Augustine
Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration. D. H. Lawrence
Love is the immortal flow of energy that nourishes, extends and preserves. Its eternal goal is life. Smiley Blanton
Love is the lesson; the universe is the teacher.
Love is the motivation and driving force behind the mystical journey – it is precisely love that leads one beyond thoughts and images and concepts into the world of silence. William Johnston
Love is the only power that is – only love Gram
Love is the only rational act. Maurie
Love is the pain and the joy of being fully alive. Joseph Campbell
Love is the pursuit of the whole. Plato
Love is the recognition of a fundamental validity. We are quite convinced that we are not really bad, not at heart where it matters. How can we escape the knowledge that the same must apply to others? When you really love a person, you don’t stop loving him because he does something bad or destructive. You’re aware of the destructive action, but it doesn’t affect your much more basic positive response to the person himself. Robert de Grimston
Love is the sole essence of all existence, the most dynamic force in the universe, the only rule and guide in judging, giving, receiving, viewing, reviewing, sensing, understanding and comprehending everyone and everything that exists. AMORC
Love is the Supreme, All-encompassing Beatitude of which all other Graces – Truth, Beauty, Goodness, Joy, etc. – are but merely part. It is the only true Reality, all else being merely the illusion projected by its absence.
Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we have learned here. The spiritual journey is the relinquishment – or unlearning – of fear and the acceptance of love back into our hearts. Love is the essential existential fact. It is our ultimate reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life. Marianne Williamson
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is wing Cupid painted blind.
Shakespeare
Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well. Vincent Van Gogh
Love means to stop comparing. Bernard Grasset
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. Anaïs Nin
Love not only makes the world go around, it also makes the ride enjoyable.
Love received and love given comprise the best form of therapy. Gordon William Allport
Love releases us into a realm of divine imagination, where the soul is expanded and reminded of its unearthly cravings and needs. We think that when a lover inflates his loved one he is failing to acknowledge her flaws – “Love is blind.” But it may be the other way around. Love allows a person to see the true angelic nature of another person, the halo, the aureole of divinity. Thomas Moore
Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives it ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair. William Blake
Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. Thomas Merton
Love takes on meaning and provides a subjective sense of liberation only insofar as it creates a flexibility in personality that allows a break-through of internal psychological barriers and taboos. . . the possibility for change, and the impetus to begin new phases of life and undertake new endeavors. Ethel Persons
Love that ends is the shadow of love; true love is without beginning or end. Hazrat Inayat Khan
Love waits on welcome, not on time. A COURSE IN MIRACLES
Love wasn't put in your heart to stay.
Love isn't love 'til you give it away.
Love wishes to be known, completely understood and shared. It has no secrets, nothing that it would keep apart and hide. It walks in sunlight, open-eyed and calm, in smiling welcome and in sincerity so simple and so obvious it cannot be misunderstood. A COURSE IN MIRACLES
Love won’t obey our expectations: its mystery is pure and absolute. Anne Rice
Love, and don't be caught in opinions and ideas about what love is or should be . . . Love, and you will know the blessings of it. Keep away from the authority who tells you what love is and what it is not. No authority knows and he who knows cannot tell. Love, and there is understanding. J. Krishnamurti
Love, as all things Eternal, increases only as it is given away.
Love: in its highest and noblest form, a joyful, spontaneous, and unconditional outpouring of oneself in response to an intrinsic quality perceived as infinitely precious in the one beloved.
Love’s creed is separate from all religions. The creed and denomination of lovers is God. Rumi
Lust without love can be very wonderful, yet the heavens will not open for it. But when lust streams from love like the rays of light do from the Sun, then heaven comes down on earth and the body is lit up with the fire of the Eternal. Tantric aphorism
Make your actions sacraments of deep love. Let them enhance the sacred mystery of your life through willful dedication or consecration. . . Turn your touch into a caress, your speech into poetry and song, your movements into grace and dance, your glance into caring. Frank Andrews
May it be, O Lord, that I seek not so much to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love; because it is in giving oneself that one receives; it is in forgetting oneself that one is found. St. Francis of Assisi
Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love. The real miracle is the love that inspires them. In this sense everything that comes from love is a miracle. A COURSE IN MIRACLES
More and more I come to value charity and love of one's fellow being above everything else. Albert Einstein
Most wonderfully, I think, you can bring back all the delight and freshness you felt in any personal relationship. What made those moments memorable was that you attention was riveted on the object of your love. When your mind is trained, you can keep this sense of delight and wonder alive always; it will actually grow with the passage of time. This is the greatest wealth a human being can have: relationships that never turn stale or sour but go on growing in depth and beauty. Eknath Eswaran
My craving for me to get acknowledgement and love was in fact a craving for me to give acknowledgement and love. Love was crying out to have permission to speak, was pleading with me to let go of my stubborn hold and allow it to express itself fully. What I wanted was not to be loved, after all, but to love. Elliot Sobel
My religion is to live through love. Rumi
My religion is very simple – my religion is kindness. XIV Dalai Lama
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence, nor imagination, nor both together go into the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius. Mozart
Never be without love, or you will be dead. Die with love and remain alive. Rumi
Never let a problem to be solved become more important than a person to be loved. Barbara Johnson
Never love less. Craig Marble
Nirvana or lasting enlightenment or true spiritual growth can be achieved only through persistent exercise of real love. M. Scott Peck
No cord or cable can draw so forcibly, or bind so fast, as love can do with a single thread. Robert
Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship. Epicurus
Oh my Lord, if I worship Thee for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, and if I worship Thee from hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise. But if I worship Thee for Thy own sake, then withhold not from me Thy eternal beauty. Rabi’a al-Adawiya
Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with another person, having neither to weight thoughts or measure words, but pouring them all right out, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away. Anonymous Shoshone
Oh, you who are trying to learn the marvel of love through the copybook of reason, I’m very much afraid that you will never really see the point. Hafiz
On earth you will probably be able to do only little things, but they can be done with great love. Mother Teresa
One spark of pure love is more precious before God than all other works taken together. St. John of the Cross
Once the realization is accepted that between even the closet human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side grows up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky. Rainer Maria Rilke
One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it, like any knight of the grail, and the journey is always toward the other soul, not away from it. Do you think that love is an accomplished thing, the day it is recognized? It isn’t. To love, you have to learn to understand the other more than she understands herself. And to submit to her understanding of you. It is damnably difficult and painful, but it is the only thing which endures. You mustn’t think that your desire or your fundamental need is to make a career, or to fill up you life with activity, or even provide for your family materially. It isn’t. Your most vital necessity in life is that you shall love your wife completely and implicitly and in entire nakedness of body and spirit. Then you will have peace and inner security no matter how may things go wrong. And this peace and security will leave you free to act and to produce your own work, a real and independent workman. D. H. Lawrence
One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood. Seneca
One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: that word is love. Sophocles
Only if one loves this earth with unbending passion can one relieve one’s sadness. A warrior is always joyful because his love is unalterable and his beloved, the earth, embraces him and bestows upon him inconceivable gifts. This lovely being, which is alive to its last recesses and understands every feeling, soothed me, it cured me of my pains, and finally when I had fully understood my love for it, it taught me freedom. don Jaun
“People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.” “You mean it want to be loved?” “Yes,” Celie, she say. “everything just want to be loved.” THE COLOR PURPLE
Perfect love gives and risks everything.
Platonic love is not love without sex. It is love that finds in the body and in human relationship a route toward eternity. Thomas Moore
Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart has turned to stone. Thomas Merton
Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are stragetists. Anita Brookner
Relationship should be built not on the giving of gifts, but on the giving of oneself.
Romantic love is not a fantasy or an aberration, but one of the great possibilities of our existence. . . ecstasy is one of the normal factors of our emotional life. . . Nathaniel Branden
Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. . . they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children, the light of the sun, the sighing of the wind, and the gleam of the stars - all the beauties of creation. Victor Hugo
Smile at each other; smile at your wife, smile at your husband, smile at your children, smile at each other – it doesn’t matter who it is – and that will help you to grow up in greater love for each other. Mother Teresa
So come my friends, be not afraid.
We are so lightly here,
It is in love that we are made,
In love we disappear.
Leonard Collins
So long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend. Robert Louis Stevenson
Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. Teilhard de Chardin
Some say love, it is a river,
That drowns the tender reed.
Some say love, it is a razor,
That leaves your soul to bleed.
Some say love, it is a hunger,
An endless aching need.
I say love, it is a flower,
And you its only seed.
It’s the heart afraid of breaking
That never learns to dance.
It’s the dream afraid of waking,
That never takes a chance.
It’s the one who won’t be taken,
Who cannot seem to give.
And the soul afraid of dying,
That never learns to live.
When the night has been too lonely,
And the road has been too long,
When you think that love is only
For the lucky and the strong,
Just remember in the winter,
Far beneath the snow,
Lies a seed that with the sun’s love,
In the Spring becomes the rose.
Amanda McBroom
Something we were withholding made us weak,
Until we found it was ourselves.
Sometimes love reaches out by letting go.
Spread your thoughts of love beyond limits. Buddha
Stimulate the heart to love, and all other virtues will rise of their own accord. W. T. Ussery
Swiftly arose and spread around me the place, the peace and joy and knowledge that passes all the art and argument of the earth, and I know that the hand of God is the elder hand of my own, and I know that the Spirit is the eldest brother of my own, and that all men ever born are also my brothers and the women my sisters and lovers, and that a keelson of creation is love. Walt Whitman
Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole. Miguel de Cervantes
Take away love and our earth is a tomb. Robert Browning
Tantric relationship is one in which the two beings participating in it meet on every level and every dimension with equal intensity. It is a relationship in which the body is not sacrificed to the soul and the soul is not sacrificed to the body. But the body is ensouled and the soul in embodied, because divine human love fuses both together. Andrew Harvey
Teach only love, for that is what you are. A COURSE IN MIRACLES
. . . that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.
William Wordsworth
That one yearns so totally to serve and fulfill the Beloved is an example of pure grace. Such complete dedication would be impossible as a mere act of will.
The aim of all spiritual practice is love. Sai Baba
The astrolabe of the mysteries of God is Love. Rumi
The best way to know God is to love many things. Vincent Van Gogh
The better part of one's life consists of his friendships. Abraham Lincoln
The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof. Richard Bach
The cause of creation is Beauty and the first creation is Love. Tarif
The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: There ought to be as many for love. Margaret Atwood
The eye of love makes every person in the world friendly and attractive. Sai Baba
The first duty of love is to listen. Paul Tillich
The friendship that can cease has never been real. St. Jerome
The gifts that most people give are but mere apologies for gifts. The only true gift that can be given is oneself. Emerson (adapted)
The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile. . . it's the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him with his friendship. Emerson
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved - loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves. Victor Hugo
The greatest healing therapy is friendship and love. Hubert Humphrey
The hardest of all is learning to be a well of affection, and not a fountain, to show them that we love them, not when we feel like it, but when they do. Nan Fairbrother
The heart can never love too much. Matthew Fox
The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. Blaise Pascal
The joining of bodies with merging of souls in shared ecstasy, giving, receiving, delighting in each other. . . until a person has enjoyed this treasure bathed in mutual bliss of minds linked as closely as bodies, that person is still virginal and alone. Robert A. Heinlein
The language of friendship is not words, but meanings. Thoreau
The love we give away is the only love we keep. Elbert Hubbard
The loveliest things are not static, and a friendship can no more be held in a binding grip than a migrating bird can be restrained or a dewdrop crystallized and aflame with the morning sun. Anna Preston
The man to whom is unveiled the mystery of Love
Exists no longer, but vanishes into Love.
The material world is not enough to nourish you; success and money and career are not enough; the only real nourishment that you can count on is love and love is possible for all of us. We can generate it and find it. What's going to matter to people when they come to the end of their lives is how much they've loved. Paul Monette
The more one judges, the less one loves. Balzac
The more the soul knows, the more she loves, and loving much, she tastes much. St. Catherine of Siena
The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers. Thich Nhat Hanh
The most wonderful of all things in life, I believe, is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a glowing depth, beauty, and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing, it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it It is sort of a Divine accident. Horace Walpole
The one I wanted came,
the one I called. . .
To scoop out, without hurting me,
a shoreline of sweet light inside my chest
so that my soul could sail.
Rafael Alberti
The only sin is not to love.
The opposite of Love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite. A COURSE IN MIRACLES
The pain of love is the pain of being alive. It’s a perpetual wound. Maureen Duffy
The path to love isn't a choice, for all of us must find out who we are. This is our spiritual destiny. The path can be postponed; you can lose faith in it or even despair that love exists. None of that is permanent; only the path is. Deepak Chopra
The pleasures of love last but a moment,
.
The power that holds the heavenly world in orbit is love. Sir James Jeans
The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out. James Arthur Baldwin
The sojourn of the soul is a thrilling divine romance in which the lover, who in the beginning is conscious of nothing but emptiness, frustration, superficiality, and the gnawing chains of bondage, gradually attains an increasingly fuller and freer expression of love, and ultimately disappears and merges in the Divine Beloved to realize the unity of the Lover and the Beloved in the supreme and eternal fact of God as Infinite Love. Meher Baba
The Spirit of God within all of us is yearning to be lived out through us as unqualified Love and caring. A COURSE IN MIRACLES
The things we love we have to learn to leave alone. Naomi Long Madgett
The true love of God comes not from the desire of heaven or fear of hell, but from itself alone.
The true measure of a man should be the amount of Love and Goodness he leaves behind.
The true name of God is Love.
The way to cast out fear is to fall in love. Matthew Fox
The world for all of us is the one whom we love. Richard Boleslavsk
The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is mingled with grief, love grows perhaps the greater. J. R. R. Tolkien
The world will not be made a paradise through the exercise of power, but the outpouring of Love.
There are worse things than a broken heart: like love not experienced.
There is a great power within that when used in beauty and immaculate purity, can cure and heal and cause miracles. When you use it, it spreads like a magic garden, and when you do not use it, it recedes from you. Cabeza de Vaca
There is a latitude of heart in Love which cannot be expressed; it enlarges the soul as wide as the whole creation of God. It is the power of all powers, nothing being able to let or hinder the omnipotence of Love, or resist its penetrating might. If thou findest it thou comest into the fountain from whence all things are proceeded, into that ground wherein they subsist. . . so great a treasure it is, that no life can express, nor tongue so much as name, what this inflaming, all-conquering Love of God is. It is brighter than the Sun; it is sweeter than any thing that is called sweet; it is stronger than all strength; it is more nourishment than any food, more cheering to the heart than wine, more pleasant than all the pleasantness of this world. Whosoever obtaineth it is richer than any sovereign on earth, and whosoever winneth it is nobler than a monarch and more potent and absolute than all earthly powers and authorities. Jacob Boehme
There is but one ocean though its coves have many names;
a single sea of atmosphere, with no coves at all;
the miracle of soil, alive and giving life, lying thin
on the only earth, for which there is no spare.
We seek a renewed stirring of love for the earth.
is often what we ought not to do. We urge that all
people now determine that an untrammeled
wildness shall remain here to testify that this
generation had love of the next.
We would celebrate a new renaissance.
The old one found a way to exploit.
The new one has discovered the earth’s limits.
Knowing them,
we may learn anew what compassion and beauty are,
and pause to listen to the earth's music.
We may see that progress is not the accelerating speed
with which we multiply and subdue the earth
nor the growing number of things we possess and cling to.
It is a way along which to search for the truth,
to find serenity and love and reverence for life,
to be part of an enduring harmony.
David Brower
There is infinite love. Why not share it? Valentine Michael Smith
There is merely misfortune in not being loved, but deterioration in not loving.
There is no difficulty that enough love will not conquer; no disease that enough love will not heal; no door that enough love will not open; no gulf that enough love will not bridge; no wall that enough love will not throw down; no sin that enough love will not redeem. It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble; how hopeless the outlook; how muddled the tangle; how great the mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all. If only you could love enough you would be the happiest and most powerful being in the world. Emmet Fox
There is no fear in love; love casteth out fear. St. John
There is no goal beyond Love: God and Love are identical. Meher Baba
There is no remedy for love but to love more. Thoreau
There is no virtue higher than Love; there is no treasure higher than Love; there is no knowledge higher than Love; there is no religion higher than Love; there is no truth higher than Love. My dear children of Love, tread the path of Love. This is your highest duty. You have taken this body to achieve Love, which alone is the goal of life. Live in Love. Breathe in Love. Meditate in Love. Sing in Love. Pray in Love. Die in Love. Purify your thoughts, speech and action in the fire of Love. Bathe and plunge in the sacred ocean of Love. Imbibe the honey of Love and become an embodiment of Love. Spread the message of Love. Let the spiritual message of oneness and the divine call to unity, friendship, and amicable cooperation reach the hearts of all and awaken Love and Brotherhood in the bosom of humanity. Let all the world be circled with Love. Swami Sivananda
There is only one happiness in life, to love and to be loved. George Sand
There is only one power in the universe, and that is Love.
There is only one thing pain is good for. It teaches you to love. God bless pain. Joey Goldfarb
There is only one thing that has power completely and that is love, because when a man loves he seeks no power and therefore he has power. Alan Paton
There is, there can be, no selfishness in Love: they are opposed one to another. . . It is impossible that these two should subsist in one person; by necessity of nature the one drives out the other. Jacob Boehme
There isn’t any secret formula or method. You learn by loving – by paying attention and doing what you thereby discover has to be done. Aldous Huxley
Think not that Love means that you must do for another what another must do. . . if you do love your fellowmen you will not do for them what it is necessary for them to do for themselves. Sananda
This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love; the more they give, the more they possess. Rainer Maria Rilke
This is why people have bodies – to touch the world with love. Frank Andrews
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and 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, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.
Love is patient, and is kind; love envieth not; love boasteth not, is not proud, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
Love never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love. St. Paul
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Jesus the Christ
Time is Too slow for those who wait,
Too swift for those who fear,
Too long for those who grieve,
Too short for those who rejoice,
But for those who love, Time is not.
Henry Van Dyke
To know and love another human being is the root of all wisdom. Evelyn Waugh
To live without loving is not really to live. Moliere
To love is not a passive thing. To love is active voice. When I love I do something, I function, I give. I do not love in order that I may be loved back again, but for the creative joy of loving. And every time I do so love I am freed, at least a little, by the outgoing of love, from enslavement to that most intolerable of master, myself. Bernard Iddings Bell
To love is nothing. To be loved is something. To love and be loved is everything. Greek Proverb
To love is to return to a home we never left, to remember who we are. Sam Keen
To love somebody is not just a strong feeling – it is a decision, it is a judgement, it is a promise. Erich Fromm
To love someone is to see a miracle invisible to others. Francois Mauriac
To make love is to return to paradise. It is to plunge again into the world before birth, before the great separation. It is to find again the primordial slowness, the blind and all-powerful rhythm of the internal world, of the great ocean. Making love is the great regression. And what is the essential language of lovers? Not speech, but touch. It is their hands that speak. And their bodies listen and understand. Frederick Leboyer
To penetrate into the essence of all being and significance and to release the fragrance of that inner attainment for the guidance of and benefit of others by expressing in the world of form Truth, Love, Purity, and Beauty: this is the soul game which has any intrinsic and absolute worth. All other happening, incidents, and attainments can in themselves have no lasting importance. Meher Baba
Trouble is a part of your life, and if you don’t share it, you don’t give the person who loves you enough chance to love you enough. Dinah Shore
True communication is communion: the realization of oneness, which is love. Eckhart Tolle
True love is born neither of the lover’s need or the beloved’s deserving: It is pure bounty
.
True Love is letting go.
Universal Love. . . embraces all antagonisms so fully as to make them complementary. Sakurazawa Nyoiti
Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense. E. E. Cummings,
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
We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end. Benjamin Disraeli
We are angels with one wing and we can only fly embracing each other.
We are here for the sake of each other. Let us help one another or at least bear with each other. Marcus Aurelius
We are shaped and fashioned by what we love. Goethe
We came here to co-create with God by extending love. Life spent with any other purpose in mind is meaningless. Marianne Williamson
We invent the person we fall in love with. We fall in love with magic. Gian Carlo Menotti
We must love one another or die. W. H. Audon
What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies. Aristotle
What is human love. It is the desire for union with a beautiful object in order to make eternity available to mortal life. Marsilio Fincino
What is noble every heart loves best. Euripides
“What is real,” asked the Rabbit one day when they were lying side by side. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?” “Real isn’t how you’re made,” said the Skin Horse, “it’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become real.” “Does it hurt,” asked the Rabbit. “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.” “Does it happen all at once, like being wound up, or bit by bit?” “It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily or have sharp edges, or have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you get loose at the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” Margery Williams from THE VELVETEEN RABBIT
What matters most of all in life is being able to make that contact with another human. Otherwise you are dead, like so many people today are dead. Ingmar Bergman
Whatever happens, become a sign of divine joy and a fountain of divine love. Bede Griffiths
Whatever you do, wherever you are, be a lover and be a passionate lover. Then you will have possessed love. . . If you have not known love, if you have not been a passionate lover, then think not your life as having been lived: on the day of reckoning it will not be counted. Rumi
When a man and a woman with significant spiritual and psychological affinities encounter each other and fall in love, if they have evolved beyond merely struggling to make their relationship “work”, then romantic love becomes the pathway not only to sexual and emotional happiness, but also to the higher reaches of human growth. It becomes the context for a continuing encounter with the self, through the process of interaction with another self. Two consciousnesses, each dedicated to personal evolution, can provide an extraordinary stimulus and challenge to the other. Then ecstasy can become a way of life. Nathaniel Branden
When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to
him,
Though the sword hidden among his
pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in
him,
as the north wind lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you so shall he
crucify you. Even as he is for your growth
so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and
caresses your tenderest branches that quiver
in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and
shake them in their clinging to the earth.
Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto
himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred
fire, that you may become sacred bread for
God’s sacred feast.
All these thing shall love do unto you
that you may know the secrets of your
heart, and in that knowledge become a
fragment of Life’s heart.
But if in your fear you would seek only
love's peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover
your nakedness and pass out of love’s
threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you
shall laugh, but not all of your laughter,
and weep, but not all of your tears.
Love gives naught but itself and takes
naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be
possessed:
For love is sufficient unto love.
When you love you should not say,
“God is in my heart,” but rather, “I am
in the heart of God.”
And think not you can direct the course
of love, for love, if it find you worthy,
directs your course.
Love has no other desire but to fulfill
Itself.
But if you love and must needs have
desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook
that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding
of love;
And to bleed willing and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart
and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate
love’s ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the
beloved in your heart and a song of praise
upon your lips.
Kahlil Gibran
When the God in me recognizes the God in you, that’s what we call love. Timothy Freke
When the soul is plunged in the fire of divine love, like iron, it first loses its blackness, and then grows to white heat and becomes like the fire itself, and lastly, it grows liquid. And, losing its nature, is transmuted into an utterly different quality of being. . . so is the difference between the tepid soul, and the soul made incandescent with divine love. Richard of St. Victor
When you say something like “I love you” with you whole being, not just with your mouth or your intellect, it can transform the world. Thich Nhat Hanh
When your fear touches someone’s pain it become pity; when your love touches someone’s pain, it becomes compassion. Stephen Levine
Where love is concerned, too much is not even enough. Pierre de Beaumarchais
Where love is, what can be wanting? Where love is not, what can possibly be profitable? St. Augustine
Where there is great love, there are always miracles. Willa Sibert Cather
Who can tell what miracles
Love has in store for us
If only we have the courage
To become one with It?
Everything we think we know now
Is only the beginning
Of another knowing that itself has no end.
And everything we now can accomplish
Will seem derisory to us
When the powers of our Divine Nature
Flower in glory and act through us.
Iqba
With every true friendship we build a foundation on which the peace of the whole world rests. Gandhi
With love in you, you have no need except to extend it. A COURSE IN MIRACLES
Work is love made visible. Kahlil Gibran
Yes, Love indeed is light from heaven;
A spark of that immortal fire
To lift from earth our low desire.
George Gordon Byron
You can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving. Carmichael
You can give your whole attention only when you care, which means that you really love. J. Krishnamurti
You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection. Buddha
You have to vanish to be Love; you have to burn away to be Love. Until you are prepared to die you cannot be Love, because Love is not some sweet emotion, it is not some insight or series of realizations. Love is being the Divine Itself. You have to cease to exist for the Divine to exist through you as you. Andrew Harvey
You learn to love by loving. Begin as a mere apprentice, and the very power of love will lead you on to become a master in the art.
You probably share society’s deep conviction that you love as a reaction to what happens to you when you encounter an object especially worthy of love. However, the great truth is that you can learn to love, deeply and continually, regardless of circumstances. Frank Andrews
You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have truly lived are the moment
when you have done things in the spirit of love. Henry Drummond
You will not be able to give love welcome separately. You could no more know God alone than He knows you without your brother. But together you could no more be unaware of love than love could know you not, or fail to recognize itself in you. A COURSE IN MIRACLES
Your friend is your needs answered.
and reap with thanksgiving.
And he is your board and your fireside.
For you come to him with your hunger,
and you seek him for peace.
save the deepening of the spirit.
For love that seeks aught but the disclosure
of its own mystery is not love but a net cast
forth: and only the unprofitable is caught.
Kahlil Gibran
Your friend will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years. Richard Bach
Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality - not as we expect it to be but as it is - is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love. Frederick Buechner
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. Rumi
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