Friday, September 25, 2009 2:21:48 PM
There once was a little boy who wanted to meet God. He knew it was a long trip to where God lived, so he packed his suitcase with cookies and a six-pack of root beer, and he started his journey
When he had gone a few blocks from home, he met an old man. He was sitting in the park near the water, just staring at some birds.
The boy sat down next to him and opened his suitcase. He was about to take a drink from his root beer, when he noticed that the old man looked hungry, so he offered him a cookie.
The old man gratefully accepted it and smiled at him. His smile was so incredible that the boy wanted to see it again, so he offered him a root beer.
Once again, he smiled at him. The boy was delighted! They sat there all afternoon eating and smiling, but they never said a word.
As it grew dark, the boy realized how tired he was, and he got up to leave. But before he had gone more than a few steps, he turned around, and ran back to the old man, and gave him a hug. The old man gave him his biggest smile ever.
When the boy opened the door to his own house a short time later, his mother was surprised by the look of joy on his face. She asked her son: “What did you do today that made you so happy?”
The child replied: “I had lunch with God.” But before his mother could respond, he added, “You know what? He's got the most beautiful smile I've ever seen!”
Meanwhile, the old man, also radiant with joy, returned to his home. His son was stunned by the look of peace on his face and asked, “Dad, what did you do today that made you so happy?”
He replied: “I ate cookies in the park with God.” But before his son responded, he added, “You know, He's much younger than I expected.”
Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring—all of which have the potential to make someone's day a very special one, or even turn someone's life around.
You will find,
As you look back upon
your life
That the moments that stand out,
The moments when you have really lived,
Are the moments when you have done things
In the spirit of love.
Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing, and forgiving. It is loyalty through good times and bad. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses.
Love is content with the present, it hopes for the future, and it doesn't brood over the past. It's the day-in-and-day-out chronicles of irritations, problems, compromises, small disappointments, big victories, and common goals.
If you have love in your life, it can make up for a great many things you lack. If you don't have it, no matter what else there is, it's not enough.
Be a spendthrift in love! Love is the one treasure that multiplies by division: It is the one gift that grows bigger the more you take from it. It is the one business in which it pays to be an absolute spendthrift; give it away, throw it away, splash it over, empty your pockets, shake the basket, turn the glass upside down, and tomorrow you will have more than ever.
Friday, August 14, 2009 1:31:00 PM
For me and most of my colleagues, life these days is a roller coaster ride between hope and fear, oscillating wildly between what's possible and what is. Like all roller coasters, this one is both exhilarating and terrifying, often simultaneously. We are fully engaged in being part of the solution, and then we plunge into despair at the enormity of the challenges and the fear that our efforts will fail.
And yet, such a wild ride between hope and fear is unavoidable. Fear is the necessary consequence of feeling hopeful again. Contrary to our belief that hope and fear are opposites where one trumps the other, they are a single package, bundled together as intimate, eternal partners. Hope never enters a room without fear at its side. If I hope to accomplish something, I'm also afraid I'll fail. You can't have one without the other.
Hope is what propels us into action. We've been taught to dream of a better world as the necessary first step in creating one. We create a clear vision for the future we want, then we set a strategy, make a plan, and get to work. We focus strategically on doing only those things that have a high probability of success. As long as we "keep hope alive" and work hard, our endeavors will create the world we want. How could we do our work if we had no hope that we'd succeed?
Motivated by hope, but then confronted by failure, we become depressed and demoralized. Life becomes meaningless; we despair of changing things for the better. At such a time, we learn the price of hope. Rather than inspiring and motivating us, hope has become a burden made heavy by its companion, fear of failing.
So we have to abandon hope, all of us, and learn how to find the place "beyond hope and fear." [...] Willingness to feel insecure is the first step on the journey beyond hope and fear. It leads to the far more challenging state: groundlessness -- knowing that nothing ever remains the same, learning to live with the unrelenting constant of change, realizing that even the good things won't last forever, accepting that change is just the way it is.
LIVE THIS DAY TO GO BEYOND YOUR HOPE AND FEAR
THE WAY YOU LIVE TODAY
Your entire destiny is contained in and determined by the way you live today: The orientation you give to your thoughts and feelings, and the activities on which you choose to spend your energies.(…)
And since every single event goes down on record, when you live one splendid, eternal day, it is recorded. It can never die or disappear; it remains forever alive, a beacon and example to those that follow. Try to live just one perfect day, for it will influence all those that come after it; it will call a meeting with them to discuss their behaviour, and then it will persuade them to be as well balanced, orderly, and harmonious as itself.
As you have never studied the magical aspect, you think, ‘Oh, just one day – what difference can it make? I know that today wasn’t too good, but tomorrow will be better.’ Will it? It all depends. It can be if you try immediately to restore order. Otherwise it will be like a game of skittles: each day that falls knocks over the next one, and then another and another. (…)
This is something that has to be done every day: be conscious and aware at each instant of how you are using your energies. It is very easy to do; no special conditions are needed. You can do it while you are walking to work, on the bus, at the dentist’s, or in your own kitchen. Wherever you are, at any moment of the day, you can always glance into yourself and ask yourself: ‘How much will it cost to do such or such a thing? Is it really useful?’ It is absolutely essential to know exactly what to spend your energies on – I can never over-emphasize this.(…)
Let the word ‘harmony’ soak into you at every moment; keep it within you as a kind of tuning fork: if you feel that you are beginning to worry or get upset, pick it up and listen to it, and do nothing until you have tuned your whole being once more. Harmony is the foundation of every successful venture, every divine realization. Before undertaking any activity, whatever it may be, learn to concentrate on harmony and your work will bear fruit for the rest of eternity.
Monday, August 10, 2009 2:23:17 PM
Abraham Lincoln:
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
Albert Camus:
Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
Alice Walker:
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
Anaïs Nin:
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
Ann Richards:
I've always said that in politics, your enemies can't hurt you, but your friends will kill you.
Anna Garlin Spencer:
The friendship between a man and a woman which does not lead to marriage or desire for marriage may be a life long experience of the greatest value to themselves and to all their circle of acquaintance and of activity; but for this type of friendship both a rare man and a rare woman are needed. Perhaps it should be added that either the man or the woman thus deeply bound in lifelong friendship who seeks marriage must find a still rarer man or woman to wed, to make such a three cornered comradeship a permanent success.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh:
If one is estranged from oneself, then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.
Aristotle:
What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.
Audre Lorde:
The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
Ben Jonson:
True friendship consists not in the multitude of friends, but in their worth and value.
Bertrand Russell:
A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.
Blaise Pascal:
Few friendships would survive if each one knew what his friend says of him behind his back.
C.S. Lewis:
Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You, too? Thought I was the only one."
Charlie Daniels:
A brief candle; both ends burning
An endless mile; a bus wheel turning
A friend to share the lonesome times
A handshake and a sip of wine
So say it loud and let it ring
We are all a part of everything
The future, present and the past
Fly on proud bird
You're free at last.
written en route to the funeral for his friend, Ronnie Van Zant of the band, Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Cicero:
It is virtue, virtue, which both creates and preserves friendship. On it depends harmony of interest, permanence, fidelity.
Confucius:
Silence is the true friend that never betrays.
Cornelia Otis Skinner:
To cement a new friendship, especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world, a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person, and cut across the accidents of place and time.
The Ape in Me, 1959
David Hume:
Truth springs from argument amongst friends.
Deng Ming-Dao:
Those truly linked don't need correspondence. When they meet again after many years apart, Their friendship is as true as ever.
Don Marquis:
There is nothing we like to see so much as the gleam of pleasure in a person's eye when he feels that we have sympathized with him, understood him. At these moments something fine and spiritual passes between two friends. These are the moments worth living.
E. B. White:
You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.
Charlotte, "Charlotte's Web"
E.M. Forster:
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
E.R. Bulwer-Lytton:
It is difficult to say who do you the most mischief: enemies with the worst intentions or friends with the best.
Ecclesiasticus 6:14:
A faithful friend is a strong defense: and he that hath found such an one hath found a treasure.
Edgar Watson Howe:
When a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it.
Eleanor Roosevelt:
Friendship with oneself is all important because without it one cannot be friends with anybody else in the world.
Elie Wiesel:
Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
Elizabeth Foley:
The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox:
All love that has not friendship for its base,
Is like a mansion built upon the sand.
Emily Dickinson:
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you -- Nobody -- too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! they'd advertise -- you know!
Emily Dickinson:
Bereavement in their death to feel
Whom We have never seen --
A Vital Kinsmanship import
Our Soul and theirs -- between --
This entry continued ...
Epicurus:
It is not so much our friends' help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us.
3rd century BCE
Francis David:
We need not think alike to love alike.
Friedrich Nietzsche:
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
George Eliot:
Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.
George Eliot:
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
George Santayana:
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.
Persons and Places: The Middle Span, 1945
George Santayana:
The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.
The Life of Reason, 1905-1906
George Washington:
Friendship is a plant of slow growth and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.
Gore Vidal:
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
HH the Dalai Lama:
We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection.
Henri Nouwen:
When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.
Henry David Thoreau:
True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.
Henry David Thoreau:
The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?
Henry Ward Beecher:
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.
Indira Gandhi:
You can't shake hands with a clenched fist.
It's a Wonderful Life:
Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.
Jane Austen:
Friendship is the finest balm for the pangs of despised love.
Jane Austen:
Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does.
Jessamyn West:
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
Katherine Mansfield:
I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.
La Rochefoucauld:
A true friend is the most precious of all possessions and the one we take the least thought about acquiring.
Louisa May Alcott:
"Stay" is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary.
Marcel Proust:
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Margaret Guenther:
[W]e all need friends with whom we can speak of our deepest concerns, and who do not fear to speak the truth in love to us.
Mark Twain:
The holy passion of friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.
Mark Twain:
The holy passion of friendship is so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring in nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.
Mark Twain:
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Marlene Dietrich:
It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.
Martin Luther King, Jr.:
Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend.
Martin Luther King, jr.:
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends
May Sarton:
Though friendship is not quick to burn,
It is explosive stuff.
Maya Angelou:
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Mohandas K. Gandhi:
It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.
Norman Douglas:
To find a friend one must close one eye; To keep him, two.
Oscar Levant:
I have no trouble with my enemies. But my goddam friends,...they are the ones that keep me walking the floor nights.
Rabindranath Tagore:
Depth of friendship does not depend on length of acquaintance.
Rachel Carson:
If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.
Rachel Naomi Remen:
The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners. Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, adapted:
The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship.
Robert Frost:
When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don't stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven't hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.
Robert Louis Stevenson:
We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
Robert Louis Stevenson:
We are all travelers in the wilderness of the world, and the best that we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
Robert McAfee Brown:
How does one keep from "growing old inside"? Surely only in community. The only way to make friends with time is to stay friends with people…. Taking community seriously not only gives us the companionship we need, it also relieves us of the notion that we are indispensable.
Rollo May:
There is an energy field between humans. And, when we reach out in passion, it is met with an answering passion and changes the relationship forever.
Samuel Coleridge:
Friendship is a sheltering tree.
Samuel Johnson:
There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.
Samuel Johnson:
Always set high value on spontaneous kindness. He whose inclination prompts him to cultivate your friendship of his own accord will love you more than one whom you have been at pains to attach to you.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
Friendship is a sheltering tree.
Sarah Orne Jewett:
Yes'm, old friends is always best, 'less you can catch a new one that's fit to make an old one out of.
Seneca:
Consult your friend on all things, especially on those which respect yourself. His counsel may then be useful where your own self-love might impair your judgment.
Shel Silverstein:
Friendship
I've discovered a way to stay friends forever --
There's really nothing to it.
I simply tell you what to do
And you do it!
Shusha Guppy:
The verb "to love" in Persian is "to have a friend." "I love you" translated literally is "I have you as a friend," and "I don't like you" simply means "I don't have you as a friend."
Simone Weil:
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?"
Simone Weil:
Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it.
Sir Francis Bacon:
There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals.
Sir Francis Bacon:
We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends.
Song of Solomon:
This is my beloved and this is my friend.
Thomas Jefferson:
But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life; and thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine.
Toni Morrison:
I'm a controversial figure. My friends either dislike me or hate me.
speech, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, 1978
Unknown:
Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.
Unknown:
Love is blind, but friendship closes its eyes.
W. Somerset Maugham:
It's no good trying to keep up old friendships. It's painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it.
Warren G. Harding:
Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.
William Blake:
The bird a nest
the spider a web
the human friendship.
William Blake:
It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.
Zora Neale Hurston:
It seems to me that trying to live without friends is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it
Monday, August 10, 2009 1:48:24 PM
Albert Einstein:
Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.
Albert Einstein:
How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?
Albert Schweitzer:
Thought cannot avoid the ethical or reverence and love for all life. It will abandon the old confined systems of ethics and be forced to recognize the ethics that knows no bounds. But on the other hand, those who believe in love for all creation must realize clearly the difficulties involved in the problem of a boundless ethic and must be resolved not to veil from [humankind] the conflicts which this ethic will involve [us], but allow [us] really to experience them. To think out in every implication the ethic of love for all creation -- this is the difficult task which confronts our age.â€
Alfred Adler:
We only regard those unions as real examples of love and real marriages in which a fixed and unalterable decision has been taken. If men or women contemplate an escape, they do not collect all their powers for the task. In none of the serious and important tasks of life do we arrange such a "getaway." We cannot love and be limited.
Alfred Tennyson:
I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Allan K. Chalmers:
The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
Ambrose Bierce:
Love: a temporary insanity, curable by marriage.
Amy Bloom:
Love at first sight is easy to understand; it's when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.
Amy Tan:
I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.
Anais Nin:
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.
Ann Landers:
If you have love in your life it can make up for a great many things you lack. If you don't have it, no matter what else there is, it's not enough.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh:
Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery:
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.
Arthur Rubinstein:
Love life and life will love you back. Love people and they will love you back.
Barbara De Angelis:
Love is a choice you make from moment to moment.
Barbara De Angelis:
Love and kindness are never wasted. They always make a difference. They bless the one who receives them, and they bless you, the giver.
Bayard Rustin:
When I say I love Eastland, it sounds preposterous -- a man who brutalizes people. But you love him or you wouldn't be here. You're going to Mississippi to create social change -- and you love Eastland in your desire to create conditions which will redeem his children. Loving your enemy is manifest in putting your arms not around the man but around the social situation, to take power from those who misuse it -- at which point they can become human too.
Bayard Taylor:
I love thee, I love but thee
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars grow old...
Bertrand Russell:
The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
Bertrand Russell:
Three passions have governed my life:
The longings for love, the search for knowledge,
And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].
Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.
In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of [people].
I have wished to know why the stars shine.
Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,
But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart
Of children in famine, of victims tortured
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,
And I too suffer.
This has been my life; I found it worth living.
adapted
Bertrand Russell:
A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.
Bible:
Love is patient, love is kind.
It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
It is not rude, it is not self-seeking.
It is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails.
I Corinthians 13:4-8
Blaise Pascal:
The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of.
C.S. Lewis:
Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone.
Carl Jung:
Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
Carter Heyward:
Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being "drawn toward." Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one's friends and enemies.
This entry continued ...
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve:
Tell me who admires and loves you,
And I will tell you who you are.
Chaucer:
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.
This entry continued ...
Dale Evans:
Every time we love, every time we give, it's Christmas.
Denis Waitley:
Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.
Don Byas:
You call it madness, but I call it love.
E.M. Forster:
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect...
Ecclesiastes:
For everything there is a season,
And a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate,
A time for war, and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
Edna St. Vincent Millay:
Life is a quest and love a quarrel ...
Edna St. Vincent Millay:
I love humanity but I hate people.
Elbert Hubbard:
The love we give away is the only love we keep.
Elie Wiesel:
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.
(Oct. 1986)
Elie Wiesel:
Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
Elizabeth Barret Browning:
Whoso loves, believes the impossible.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox:
All love that has not friendship for its base,
Is like a mansion built upon the sand.
Emily Dickinson:
That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love.
Emily Dickinson:
Love—is anterior to Life—
Posterior—to Death—
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth—
Emily Dickinson:
Who has not found the heaven below
Will fail of it above.
God's residence is next to min,
His furniture is love.
Emma Goldman:
Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere.
Erich Fromm:
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."
Ernest Becker:
When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.
Euripides:
He is not a lover who does not love forever.
Felix Adler:
Love is the expansion of two natures in such fashion that each include the other, each is enriched by the other.
Francis David:
We need not think alike to love alike.
Franklin P. Jones:
Love doesn't make the world go 'round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile.
Friedrich Nietzsche:
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Friedrich Nietzsche:
The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.
Georg C. Lichtenberg:
Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.
George Jean Nathan:
Love is an emotion experienced by the many and enjoyed by the few.
George MacDonald:
To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.
George Sand:
There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.
George Santayana:
Love is only half the illusion; the lover, but not his love, is deceived.
The Life of Reason, 1905-1906
Goethe:
To be loved for what one is, is the greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him, their own selves, their version of him.
H. L. Mencken:
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia -- to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
Prejudices, 1919
HH the Dalai Lama:
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.
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HH the Dalai Lama:
When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace.
HH the Dalai Lama:
We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection.
Han Suyin [Elizabeth Comber]:
...love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.
b. 1917 Chinese writer and physician
Hazrat Inayat Khan:
The sage said, "The best thing is not to hate anyone, only to love. That is the only way out of it. As soon as you have forgiven those whom you hate, you have gotten rid of them. Then you have no reason to hate them; you just forget.
Spiritual Dimensions of Psychology
Helen Keller:
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.
Henri Nouwen:
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.
Henry David Thoreau:
Love must be as much a light as it is a flame.
Henry David Thoreau:
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Henry Miller:
The real enemy can always be met and conquered, or won over. Real antagonism is based on love, a love which has not recognized itself.
Henry Miller:
The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we can never give enough of is love.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
If I am not worth the wooing, I am surely not worth the winning.
Herman Hesse:
If I know what love is, it is because of you.
Hermann Hesse:
You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.
Hobbes (of Calvin and ...):
I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each others dreams, we can be together all the time.
Houssaye:
Tell me whom you love and I will tell you who you are.
Ingrid Bergman:
A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.
Iris Murdock:
We can only learn to love by loving.
Isha McKenzie-Mavinga:
On reflection, one of the things I needed to learn was to allow myself to be loved.
James Baldwin:
The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
Another Country, 1962
James D. Bryden:
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 Thurber and E.B. White:
Love is the strange bewilderment which overtakes one person on account of another person.
Jane Austen:
Friendship is the finest balm for the pangs of despised love.
Jane Austen:
One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it unless it has all been suffering, nothing but suffering.
Jean Baptiste Henry Lacordaire:
We are the leaves of one branch, the drops of one sea, the flowers of one garden.
Jean Goss:
All ideologies end up killing people. If you separate love from nonviolence you turn nonviolence into an ideology, a gimmick. Structures that are not inhabited by justice and love have no liberating or reconciling force, and are never sources of life.
Jeanne Moreau:
Age does not protect you from love, but love to some extent protects you from age.
Jessamyn West:
A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.
The Quaker Reader, 1962
Jimi Hendrix:
When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.
Joan Vinge:
Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it.
The Snow Queen
John Lennon:
Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear.
Jonathan Swift:
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
Karl Menninger:
Love cures people -- both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
Katharine Hepburn:
Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.
Lily Tomlin:
If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?
Lisa Hoffman:
Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important.
M. Scott Peck:
Although the act of nurturing another's spiritual growth has the effect of nurturing one's own, a major characteristic of genuine love is that the distinction between oneself and the other is always maintained and preserved.
Madeleine de Scudery:
Love makes mutes of those who habitually speak most fluently.
Marc Estrin:
Kindness trumps greed: it asks for sharing. Kindness trumps fear: it calls forth gratefulness and love. Kindness trumps even stupidity, for with sharing and love, one learns.
Marcel Proust:
In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual, delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted, atrocious.
Margaret Anderson:
In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love you want the other person.
Margaret Guenther:
[W]e all need friends with whom we can speak of our deepest concerns, and who do not fear to speak the truth in love to us.
Mark Twain:
Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
Mark Twain:
Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
Mark Twain:
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.
Adam, in Adam's Diary
Martin Luther King, Jr.:
Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend.
Martin Luther King, jr.:
At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love.
Martin Luther King, jr.:
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
Martin Luther King, jr.:
We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.
Mary Oliver:
To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. Blackwater Woods
Mary Parrish:
Love vanquishes time. To lovers, a moment can be eternity, eternity can be the tick of a clock.
Mary S. Calderone:
I truly feel that there are as many ways of loving as there are people in the world and as there are days in the life of those people.
Matthew Arnold:
Is it so small a thing
To have enjoy'd the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done...
Mitsugi Saotome:
If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth.
Mohandas K. Gandhi:
Forgiveness is choosing to love. It is the first skill of self-giving love.
Mohandas K. 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.
Mohandas K. Gandhi:
Where there is love there is life.
Mohandas K. Gandhi:
Whether humanity will consciously follow the law of love, I do not know. But that need not disturb me. The law will work just as the law of gravitation works, whether we accept it or not. The person who discovered the law of love was a far greater scientist than any of our modern scientists. Only our explorations have not gone far enough and so it is not possible for everyone to see all its workings.
Molleen Matsumura:
Love is like a campfire: It may be sparked quickly, and at first the kindling throws out a lot of heat, but it burns out quickly. For long lasting, steady warmth (with delightful bursts of intense heat from time to time), you must carefully tend the fire. (2007)
Molleen Matsumura:
Love is more than just a feeling: it's a process requiring continual attention. Loving well takes laughter, loyalty, and wanting more to be able to say, "I understand" than to hear, "You're right." (1999)
Molly Haskell:
But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none, to give rhythmic variations, highs and lows to a landscape that was previously flat.
Mother Teresa:
The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.
Mother Teresa:
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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne:
It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility.
from The Scarlet Letter
Norman Lindsay:
The best love affairs are those we never had.
Oscar Hammerstein, II:
Do you love me because I'm beautiful,
or am I am beautiful because you love me?
Oscar Wilde:
Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde:
Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.
Paul Tillich:
The first duty of love is to listen.
Pearl Bailey:
What the world really needs is more love and less paperwork.
Pearl S. Buck:
A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.
Pearl S. Buck:
The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.
Pearl S. Buck:
I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.
Rainer Maria Rilke:
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.
Reinhold Niebuhr:
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.
Robert Frost:
Earth's the right place for love. I don't know where it's likely to go better.
Birches
Robert Fulghum:
I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- myth is more potent than history -- dreams are more powerful than facts -- hope always triumphs over experience -- laughter is the cure for grief -- love is stronger than death.
Robert G. Ingersoll:
Love is the only bow on life's dark cloud.
It is the Morning and the Evening Star.
It shines upon the cradle of the babe,
and sheds its radiance upon the quiet tomb.
It is the mother of Art,
inspirer of poet, patriot, and philosopher.
It is the air and light of every heart, builder of every home,
kindler of every fire on every hearth.
It was the first to dream of immortality.
It fills the world with melody,
for Music is the voice of Love.
Love is the magician, the enchanter,
that changes worthless things to joy,
and makes right royal kings and queens of common clay.
It is the perfume of the wondrous flower -- the heart
and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon,
we are less than beasts;
but with it, earth is heaven
and we are gods.
Robert Heinlein:
Love is a condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
Roger de Bussy-Rabutin:
Absence is to love as wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small and kindles the great.
Rose Walker:
Have you even been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...
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Roy Croft:
I love you
Not only for what you are
But for what I am
When I am with you
Love (first stanza)
Rumi:
Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absent-minded.
Someone sober will worry about events going badly.
Let the lover be.
Rumi:
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:
Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.
Rumi:
Come out of the circle of time
And into the circle of love.
Saint Francis de Sales:
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.
Samuel Butler:
Perhaps; but is it not Tennyson who has said: "'Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have lost at all"? in The Way of All Flesh
Sharon Welch:
Resistance to oppression is often based on a love that leads us to value ourselves, and leads us to hope for more
than the established cultural system is willing to grant ... such love is far more energizing than guilt, duty, or self-sacrifice. Love for others leads us to accept accountability (in contrast to feeling guilt) and motivates our search for ways to end our complicity with structures of oppression. Solidarity does not require self-sacrifice, but an enlargement of the self to include community with others. [The Feminist Ethic of Risk]
Simone Weil:
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?"
Sir Arthur Pinero:
Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.
Song of Solomon:
This is my beloved and this is my friend.
Spanish proverb:
Where there is love, there is pain.
St. Augustine:
Better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.
Søren Kierkegaard:
Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.
Thomas Merton:
It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them…. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.
Tom Robbins:
The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.
Still Life With Woodpecker
Truman Capote:
The true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.
Other Voices, Other Rooms, 1948
Unknown:
Love is blind, but friendship closes its eyes.
Ursula K. LeGuin:
Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
Ursula LeGuin:
Love doesn't sit there like a stone. It has to made like bread; remade all the time, made new.
Victor Frankl:
A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."
Victor Hugo:
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
W.H. Murray:
...the more the soul knows, the more she loves, and loving much, she tastes much.
from the journal of his Himalayan expedition
Washington Irving:
Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.
Willa Cather:
Where there is great love, there are always miracles.
Willa Cather:
Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.
William Arthur Ward:
Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you. Love me and I may be forced to love you.
William E. Gladstone :
We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.
William Shakespeare:
Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.
William Shakespeare:
Love all, trust a few.
William Shakespeare:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.
"Romeo and Juliet"
William Sloane Coffin:
The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
William Sloane Coffin, Jr.:
Love measures our stature: the more we love, the bigger we are. There is no smaller package in all the world than that of a man all wrapped up in himself.
William Wordsworth:
The little unremembered acts of kindness and love are the best parts of a person's life.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart:
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
Zelda Fitzgerald:
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much a heart can hold.
Zora Neale Hurston:
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
Zora Neale Hurston:
Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.
My Opera
Regards to all... and God bless
