Quotes and text excerpts about "love"

“ Love is like a tree rooted in the ground sending its shoots above the starry heaven; its fruits are found in the heart, the tongue and the limbs of the lover-in fact his whole self is a witness to love just as smoke is a sure sign of fire burning. ”

“ Love is the actual good, the supreme good which resolves all the contradictions of life; which not only dissipates the fear of death, but impels man to sacrifice himself to others: for there is no love but that which enables a man to give his life for those he loves: love is not worthy of the name unless it is a sacrifice of self. ”

“ Love is ingenious, and full, and quick, and active, and resolute; it is valiant, and patient, and exceeding industrious, and delighteth to encounter difficulties, and to appear in labours, and to show itself in advantageous sufferings; and therefore it maketh the mind in which it reigneth exceeding busy, and findeth the thoughts a world of work. ”

“ Being in love is a condition that may have its moments of sublime exaltation, but it is for the most part an experience far down the scale below divine experience; it is often love only in so far as it shares the name with better things; it is greed, it is admiration, it is desire, it is the itch for excitement, it is the instinct for competition, it is lust, it is curiosity, it is adventure, it is jealousy, it is hate. ”

“ There is a love beyond both love and hate.
Loving is the only life. Love closes no doors. It throws everything wide open. Houses and hearts. We go from love to more love. To say love is to say no more than that things get along together. To look at the stars and say love is only to say that the stars obey the law of life. To look at the body of a woman as a man and say love is only to say that the flesh obeys the law of life. ”

“ Love is the mediator and interpreter between gods and men; and love of the beautiful, which manifests itself in the procreation and love of offspring, is the desire for immortality, the children being the continuation of the immortal part of their parents. ”

“ Love is substance and power in their essence and origin. Love is the substance of the Divine Being. It is another name for life; it is life. It contains within itself the promise and potency of the whole creation; of all that is not God. As a Divine and a self-existing substance it contains within itself the power to create all finite substances from itself, and out of them to organize all forms and imbue them with life. Loving is love in action; emotion is the effect of the power of love, as the motion of an engine is due to the power of steam. ”

“ Love is a personal proof that something good and earnest and eternal is meant us; such a bribe and foretaste of bliss being given us to keep us in the lists of time and progression; and when the world has realized what love urges it to obtain, perhaps death will cease and all the souls which love has created crowd [Pg 207] back at its summons to inhabit their perfected world. ”

“ Love is a celestial respiration of the air of paradise.
Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a long trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step inside the tomb. ”

“ Love lightens labor, shortens distance and quickens time. Love teaches us to forgive, helps us to forget and whitens the memory of all things. Love paints every hope, brightens every scene and maketh beautiful whatsoever it shines on. Love is wisdom. Love is high. Love is holy. Love is God. Love gloweth in the hearts of the angels, wreathes the smiles on their brows and melts the kisses on their lips. Love is the light of the beautiful beyond. ”

“ Love is the flight of the soul towards God, towards the great, the sublime, and the beautiful, which are the shadow of God upon earth. Love your family, the partner of your life, those around you ready to share your joys and sorrows, the dead who were dear to you, and to whom you were dear. ”

“ Love is a sacred mystery whose secret is as yet locked away from mortals. We recognize a few of its manifestations and dream of its power. We connect it in our thoughts with marriage and birth, but we assume its presence: we do not bring proof.
Love is spirit, and can not be analyzed nor understood. ”

“ Love is the middle term, the substantial bond, the principle of reconciliation between the perfect and the imperfect, the sinless and sinful being, the universal and the individual, the divine and the human. Love is God himself, and apart from it there is no God. Love makes man God and God man. Love strengthens the weak and weakens the strong, abases the high and raises the lowly, idealises matter and materialises spirit. Love is the true unity of God and man, of spirit and nature. In love common nature is spirit, and the pre-eminent spirit is nature. ”

“ THE CULTIVATION OF LOVE
Love is so akin to our nature, so eager to enter our souls, that to want is to get it; to seek is to find it; to open our hearts to its presence is to discover it already there. Whoever knows what true prayer is—the intense, eager yearning for good of insistent, importunate hearts—knows that there never was and never can be one unanswered prayer. ”

“ Love is an involuntary and compulsory craving which draws a male and a female into the closest possible union for the purpose of mutual sexual gratification, generally followed by conception and reproduction. ”

“ The love that has nothing but beauty to sustain it, soon withers and dies. The love that is fed with presents always requires feeding. Love, and love only, is the loan for love. Love is of the nature of a burning glass, which, kept still in one place, fireth; changed often, it doth nothing. The purest joy we can experience in one we love, is to see that person a source of happiness to others. When you are with the person loved, you have no sense of being bored. ”

“ Holy love is a fire that begets a vehement heat in the soul, and consumes the dross and chaff that are in it, melts it down like wax into a new form, and carries it upwards as the sparks towards God and heaven. ”

“ Love is indeed universally all that earnest desire for the possession of happiness and that which is good; the greatest and the subtlest love, and which inhabits the heart of every living being; but those who seek this object through the acquirement of wealth, or the exercise of the gymnastic arts, or philosophy, are not said to love, nor are called lovers; one species alone is called love, and those alone are said to be lovers, and to love, who seek the attainment of the universal desire through one species of love, which is peculiarly distinguished by the name belonging to the whole. ”

“ Love is the essential element in man; it exists, as man exists, whole and complete, and nothing can be added to it, for it transcends the growing phenomenon of the sensuous life, and is independent of it. It is knowledge alone to which this sensuous life is connected, and which begins and develops with it. This development is but slow and gradual with the progress of time; how, then, is that innate love to pass through the years of ignorance, and develop and exercise itself until an ordered system of ideas of right and wrong is formed, to which the motive of pleasure can be connected? ”

“ Man's love is what constitutes his intention and determines his internal sight or thought to its objects; thus the love of self fixes it upon self and its objects, the love of the world upon worldly objects, and the love of heaven upon heavenly objects; and when the love is known the state of the interiors which constitute the mind can be known, that is, the interiors of one who loves heaven are raised towards heaven and are opened above; while the interiors of one who loves the world or who loves himself are closed above and are opened outwardly. ”

“ A man in love who pities the reasonable man seems to me like one who reads fairy tales and jeers at those who read history.
Love resembles epidemic diseases: the more one fears them, the more liable is one to infection.
In witnessing or experiencing the pains inseparable from intense feeling in love and friendship, be it by the death of the loved person or by the accidents of life, one is tempted to believe that dissipation and frivolity are not such great follies after all, and that life is scarce worth more than what fashionable folk make of it. ”

“ In many men it is love for an ideal woman that does it. They keep themselves from evil because, though they may never have met her, they believe one day they will, and they want to bring her their best selves without any spot of defilement. In many girls love works in the same redemptive way. And perhaps in both what is really working is a mystic longing after the best that life can hold, and a half-conscious understanding that that best is only for those who preserve unity between body and spirit, and keep the body in bonds until the pure command of love itself summons it to freedom. ”

“ Yet if we have love toward others, we know how our hearts warm to them, how we long for their presence, how we are willing to drop all selfish considerations for their sakes, what sacrifices we are ready to make to render them happy, how willing we are to do and dare, to work, to surrender, to live for them. Love is gentle, kind, disinterested, diligent, constant, and these in all things, to the person loved. ”

“ Many a woman never knows love until it is awakened in her heart by him who henceforth is to be a part of herself.
But the common answer, that most people everywhere give to that question, is that a mother's love is the greatest human love we know. And if you press them to tell why they think so, this stands out oftenest and strongest—that it is because she gives so much of herself. She gives her very life. If need be, she sacrifices everything in life, and then sacrifices life itself, going out into the darkness of death that her child may come into fulness and sweetness of life. ”

“ A man is a man while neighbourly love, or the love of doing uses, constitutes the head, the love of the world the body, and the love of self the feet; whereas if the love of the world constitutes the head, the man is as it were hunched-backed; but when the love of self constitutes the head, he is like a man standing not on his feet, but on the palms of his hands with his head downwards and his haunches upwards. ”

“ A man whom a woman has won by sheer artifice, she can love to the end of her life. But, after all,
What a refuge, to man, is work—or play! Alas!
Women has no refuge. So,
Men cannot suffer long; women do.
A man flies to work, or sport, or to the gaming-table, or to drink. A woman . . . . . .
He who can tell what a woman does in the sorrow of the soul, will tell us much.
Some women, in sorrow of soul, eat out their hearts in silence; other women, in sorrow of soul, will tell us much. Some women, in sorrow of soul, eat out their hearts in silence ”

“ No worse fate can befall a man in this world than to live and grow old alone, unloving and unloved. At any cost cultivate a loving nature. Then you will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have really lived are the moments when you have done things in a spirit of love. As memory scans the past, above and beyond all the transitory pleasures of life, there leap forward those supreme hours when you have been enabled to do unnoticed kindnesses to those around about you, things too trifling to speak about, but which you feel have entered into your eternal life. ”

“ Fear is a wholesome element in the human economy; they are merely silly who would banish it from all association with religion. True, there is no religion in fear; religion is love, and love casts out fear; but until a man has love, it is well he should have fear. So long as there are wild beasts about, it is better to be afraid than secure.
The vague awe ready to assail every soul that has not found rest in its source, readier the more honest the soul, had for the first time laid hold of Mercy. ”

“ It is impossible for a man to take any knowledge from himself, since he has no connate knowledge; but he may take it from others; and as he cannot take any knowledge from himself, so neither can he take any love; for where there is no knowledge there is no love; knowledge and love being undivided companions, and no more capable of separation than will and understanding, or affection and thought; yea, no more than essence and form: therefore in proportion as a man takes knowledge from others, so love joins itself thereto as its companion. ”

“ As I have clung to myself despite the evil, so I have clung to the world despite all the evil that is in the world. To lose faith in men, not humanity; to see justice go down and not believe in the triumph of injustice; for every wrong that you weakly deal another or another deals you to love more and more the fairness and beauty of what is right; and so to turn with ever-increasing love from the imperfection that is in us all to the Perfection that is above us all—the perfection that is God: this is one of the ideals of actual duty that you once said were to be as candles in my hand. ”

“ Hate and despise all human glory, for it is nothing else but human folly. It is the greatest snare, and the greatest betrayer that you can possibly admit into your heart.
Let every day therefore be a day of humility; condescend to all the infirmities of your fellow-creatures, cover their frailties, love their excellencies, encourage their virtues, relieve their wants, rejoice in their prosperities, compassionate their distress, receive their friendship, overlook their unkindness, forgive their malice, be a servant of servants, and condescend to do the lowest offices to the lowest of mankind. ”

“ It is lawful to suspend judgment in case of reasonable doubts, if there is no obligation of deciding one way or the other, for in so doing one does no injury either to one’s own intelligence (since the doubt is reasonable) or to the honor of another person (since, as supposed, there is no obligation of judging positively in his favor) . Just as there is no duty of making acts of love of our neighbor on every occasion, neither is there a duty of deciding doubts to his advantage on every occasion, or of having any opinion about him whatever. ”

“ In my opinion, a man may not only freely choose his aims in life, but he may attain all those aims which he seriously and wholly desires, provided that for the sake of this desire he is ready to surrender all other desires which are inconsistent with it. The best possessions one can have in life, and the things which, with reasonable sagacity, are the easiest to get, are these: firm moral principles, intellectual discipline, [49] love, loyalty, the capacity for work and the enjoyment of it, spiritual and physical health, and very moderate worldly possessions. ”

“ A man can only make enemies among his friends. A certain amount of opposition and enmity a man must be prepared for in this world, unless he live a very invertebrate life. Outside opposition cannot embitter, for it cannot touch the soul. But that two who have walked as friends, one in aim and one in heart, perhaps of the same household of faith, should stand face to face with hard brows and gleaming eyes, should speak as foes and not as lovers of the same love, is, in spite of the poets and romancers, the bitterest moment of life. ”