Love

For there is one thing I can safely say: that those bound by love must obey each other if they are to keep company long. Love will not be constrained by mastery; when mastery comes, the God of love at once beats his wings, and farewell -- he is gone. Love is a thing as free as any spirit; women naturally desire liberty, and not to be constrained like slaves; and so do men, if I shall tell the truth. -Chaucer:

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. -Elie Wiesel

Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it. -Joan Vinge, The Snow Queen

Whoso loves, believes the impossible. -Elizabeth Barret Browning

Love?is anterior to Life?
Posterior?to Death?
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth?

-Emily Dickinson

Responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each of us individually. Peace, for example, starts within each one of us. When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us. When our community is in a state of peace, it can share that peace with neighboring communities, and so on. When we feel love and kindness towards others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace. And there are ways in which we can consciously work to develop feelings of love and kindness.

For some of us, the most effective way to do so is through religious practice. For others it may be non-religious practices. What is important is that we each make a sincere effort to take our responsibility for each other and for the natural environment we live in seriously. - the Dalai Lama: Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1989

...love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other. -Han Suyin [Elizabeth Comber]: b. 1917 Chinese writer and physician

Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding line, and no way of knowing how near the harbor was. "Light! Give me light!" was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour. -Helen Keller

Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body's deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body's superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity. -Henri Nouwen

There is no remedy for love but to love more. -Henry David Thoreau

A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain. - Jessamyn West, The Quaker Reader, 1962

When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace. -Jimi Hendrix

Love cures people -- both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it. -Karl Menninger

Where there is love there is life. -Mahatma Gandhi

Hatred ever kills, love never dies. Such is the vast difference between the two. What is obtained by love is retained for all time. What is obtained by hatred proves a burden in reality for it increases hatred. -Mahatma Gandhi

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

After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her. -Mark Twain, Adam, in Adam's Diary

Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend. -Martin Luther King, Jr.

Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go. -Mother Teresa

The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of. -Pascal

You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves. -Francis de Sales

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?" -Simone Weil

This is my beloved and this is my friend. -Song of Solomon

The little unremembered acts of kindness and love are the best parts of a person's life. -William Wordsworth

Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much. -Zora Neale Hurston

If you find pleasure in souls, let them be loved in God. -Augustine (354-430)

They [the early believers] lived and loved, as if each Christian?s heart had forsaken his own, to creep into his brother?s bosom. -William Gurnall (1616-79)

He who really loves his Lord will not trifle with the least jot or tittle of his Lord?s will. Love is one of the most jealous things in the universe. ?God is a jealous God? because ?God is love.? The wife who truly loves her husband will not harbour even a wanton imagination; her fidelity to him must not be stained even by an unchaste thought; so must it be with every true lover of the Lord Jesus Christ. -Charles H. Spurgeon (1834-92)

Love is an expansion of the soul, or the inflaming of the affections, by which a Christian breathes after God as the supreme and sovereign good. -Thomas Watson (1620-86)

The heart that burns in love melts with tears. -Thomas Watson (1620-86)

True love is not mercenary. You need not hire a mother to love her child: a soul deeply in love with God needs not be hired by rewards. It cannot but love Him for that lustre of beauty that sparkles forth in Him. -Thomas Watson (1620-86)

Faith, with undimmed and steady eye, looks at the cross; hope, with expanded and untiring wing, soars onward to the crown; and love prostrates itself before both in adoring gratitude and praise. -Octavius Winslow (1808-78)

Love all men, my dear brothers, but bestow the greatest part of your love on the ugliest souls. -Richard Wurmbrand (1909-2001)

Love really needs no explanation. When Mihai was five, I came home one day and learned from my wife that he had committed some wrongdoing for which he needed to be punished. This time I decided to try a different approach. I left him alone. The next morning, I told him the story of how Peter denied his Lord, and how, later, Jesus asked him three times: ?Do you love Me?? When I had told him the story, I asked Mihai, ?Do you love Jesus?? ?Yes,? said Mihai. I asked him again, ?Do you love Jesus?? And again he answered, ?Yes.? The third time I asked the question, he understood that I was chiding him for his sin of the day before. Tears came to his eyes as he said for the third time, ?Yes, I love Jesus.? I thought that he might simply be repeating the words of Peter without really meaning them. So I asked him, ?How do you know that you really love Him?? His thoughtful rejoinder was: ?Jesus did not ask Peter that. He was satisfied with the words, I love you.? -Richard Wurmbrand (1909-2001)