Love

At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet. -- Plato

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. -- Carl Jung

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. -- Goethe

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

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

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. -- Thomas Merton

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.
-- Rome and Juliet, William Shakespeare

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
-- Zora Neale Hurston

Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves. -- Pascal

There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved. -- Somerset Maugham

The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost. -- G. K. Chesterton

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. – Anais Nin

We all know people who try to cover up their kindly gestures with irony and indifference, as if love were synonymous with weakness. -- Paul Coehlo

To love someone deeply gives you strength. Being loved by someone deeply gives you courage. -- Lao Tzu

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. –CS Lewis