Love Itself Quotes

Love itself starts with the desire for something good. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

Here God is not approached as an object that we must love, but as a mystery present in the very act of love itself. ~ Peter Rollins

I am a twentiethcentury individual. I am working myself up to a point where I can exist beyond guilt, beyond blood, beyond the ridiculous past. Thank goodness for America. In this country there's a chance to accomplish such a thing. I want to look straight ahead. I want to see things clearly. I'd like to become singleminded and straightforward in the most literal sense of those words. History is no more accurate than prophecy. I reject the wrathful God of the Hebrews. I reject the Christian God of love and money, although I don't reject love itself or money itself. I reject heritage, background, tradition and birthright. These things merely slow the progress of the human race. They result in war and insanity, war and insanity, war and insanity. ~ Don DeLillo

Mutual respect implies discretion and reserve even in love itself; it means preserving as much liberty as possible to those whose life we share. We must distrust our instinct of intervention, for the desire to make one's own will prevail is often disguised under the mask of solicitude. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

There is nothing more evil than "Love" itself. ~ William Shakespeare

The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves. ~ Albert Camus

The experience of not forgetting consciousness alone is the state of devotion which is the relationship of unfading real love, because the real knowledge of Self, which shines as the undivided supreme bliss itself, surges up as the nature of love. Love itself is the actual form of God. That is pure bliss. Call it pure bliss, God, Self, or what you will. That is devotion, that is realization and that is everything. ~ Ramana Maharshi

That's what Papa counting on, no doubt. But romantic love is . . .I don't wish to say that romantic love itself is a fraud - I'm sure the feelings it inspires are genuine enough, however temporary. But the way it's held up as this pristine, everlasting joy every woman ought to strive for - when in fact love is more like beef brought over from Argentina on refrigerated ships: It might stay fresh for a while under carefully controlled conditions, but sooner or later it's qualities will begin to degrade. Love is by and large a perishable good and it is lamentable that young people are asked to make irrevocable, till-death-do-we-part decisions in the midst of a short-lived euphoria. ~ Sherry Thomas

If I stay

Life is more than just a game.

I've learnt that fun is not the same

When faced with such a thorny choice,

I close my eyes and hear a voice…

It tells me what to do and say

When to go and when to stay.

When it's time to run away,

But it won't tell me this.

But still why me? I ask you why?

Why must I choose to live or die?

To this I can't turn a blind eye;

I've done that far too much.

So many reasons say 'don't go'

I'd want to stay but I don't know

When love itself is lost from earth

Should I still walk on it's soft hearth?

Is there yet a space for me?

Is there still someone I might be?

Can I stay here on my own?

Can I face the world alone?

Some say dying is just a step,

That life is one and this the next,

But can I watch life blow away?

And what will happen

If I stay? ~ Gayle Forman

When all violence subsides in the human heart, the state which remains is love. It is not something we have to acquire; it is always present, and needs only to be uncovered. This is our real nature, not merely to love one person here, another there, but to be love itself. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Love has no other aim except love itself ~ Karen Colibri

Love itself is obvious.You meet, love, part ways, get hurt and you meet again. I bet people get married because they're tired of repeating those things. ~ Kim A-joong

What do you know of great love? Have you ever loved a woman until milk leaked from her as though she had just given birth to love itself, and now must feed it or burst? Have you ever tasted a woman until she believed that she could be satisfied only by consuming the tongue that had devoured her? Have you ever loved a woman so completely that the sound of your voice in her ear could cause her body to shudder and explode with such intense pleasure that only weeping could bring her full release? ~ Don Juan DeMarco

He was a hidden God, full of secrecy. Truly, he did not come by his son otherwise than by secret ways. At the door of his faith stands adultery.
Whoever extols him as a God of love, does not think highly enough of love itself. Did not that God want also to be judge? But the loving one loves irrespective of reward and requital.
When he was young, that God out of the Orient, then was he harsh and revengeful, and built himself a hell for the delight of his favourites.
At last, however, he became old and soft and mellow and pitiful, more like a grandfather than a father, but most like a tottering old grandmother. [...] and one day he suffocated of his all-too-great pity. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

All suffering is a consequence of a constant quest. A quest to follow a mirage, the mirage that is the creation of our mind, the illusion of happiness, the illusion of being loved. That is what it is. Love itself is an illusion. We misuse the word so much we forget what it means. It means nothing, because it simply does not exist. It is the destiny of the mind to seek. When it does not discover what it seeks, it gives birth to hopelessness. And given our undying spirit, from that hopelessness rises hope itself. This hope takes us to the quest all over again, churning us in an endless cycle of suffering. This cycle is called life. Suffer you will, one way or the other... ~ Nilesh Rathod

At that period I paid as constant attention to the greater securing of my happiness, to enjoying and judging it, too, as I had always done for the smallest details of my acts; and what is the act of love, itself, if not a moment of passionate attention on the part of the body? Every bliss achieved is a masterpiece; the slightest error turns it awry, and it alters with one touch of doubt; any heaviness detracts from its charm, the least stupidity renders it dull. My own felicity is in no way responsible for those of my imprudences which shattered it later on; in so far as I have acted in harmony with it I have been wise. I think still that someone wiser than I might well have remained happy till his death. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar

Love asks us to enjoy our life
For nothing good can come of death.
Who is alive? I ask.
Those who are born of love.
Seek us in love itself,
Seek love in us ourselves.
Sometimes I venerate love,
Sometimes it venerates me. ~ Rumi

How shall we be beautiful? By loving the One who is always beautiful. The more love grows in you, the more beauty grows: for love itself is the beauty of the soul. ~ Augustine Of Hippo

Let your Teacher be Love itself. ~ Rumi

I knew, deep down, that love, though a beautiful beginning, isn't enough. It's the practice of honoring and caring for another that's noble, not the emotion of love itself. The emotion is the easy part. ~ Megan McCafferty

That's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

And when Mary nodded, Pauline said, "You'd better hurry then, you know how how is," and laughed to show she would not be married to bald John Keane for all the tea in China. In her laugh was every confidence Mary had ever shared with Pauline about her husband's failings, every unguarded criticism, every angry, impromptu, frustrated critique of his personality, his manners, his sometimes morbid, sometimes inscrutable, sometimes impatient ways. A repository, Pauline and her laugh, for every moment in thier marriage when Mary Keane had not loved her husband, when love itself had seemed a misapprehension, a delusion (a stranger standing outside of Schrafft's transformed into an answered prayer), and marriage
which Pauline had had sense enough to spurn
simply an awkward pact with a stranger, any stranger, John or George, Tom, Dick, or Harry.
A repository, Pauline and her laugh, her knowing eye, for all that Mary Keane should have kept to herself. ~ Alice McDermott

No," he says, stepping closer and giving my hand another squeeze. "That's not reality. Love just makes everything else in life easier to bear. It's like having an army on your side. But love itself isn't easy. Most people have to fight for it, they fight to keep it. Love is a war, and half the time you're battling your own fucking self. ~ Karina Halle

Love itself is the most elitist of passions. It acquires its stereoscopic substance and perspective only in the context of culture, for it takes up more place in the mind than it does in bed. Outside of that setting it falls flat into one-dimensional fiction. ~ Joseph Brodsky

We commonly confuse love with the strong emotions most often associated with it, such as joy, attachment, lust, infatuation, pleasure, pain, fear, and hope, to name a few. But, love is not a feeling; love itself is an action. There are countless emotions and beliefs that can cause us to love. Love is the willing giving of self to another living being. Love is giving the life, time, energy, and resources that we would normally give or use for our self to someone else. Love is an action that enhances the well-being of another living being. ~ C W Newman

Poetry reproduces an indefinable mood that is more amorous than love itself. Venus is not so beautiful all naked, alive, and panting, as she is here in Virgil. ~ Michel De Montaigne

It dawned on him that the loneliness of marriage, the thing Alice had so feared, starts out of love itself, which can never deliver on its promises. ~ Josephine Humphreys

The Buddhas and the Christs are born complete. They neither seek love nor give love, because they are love itself. But we who are born again and again must discover the meaning of love, must learn to live love as the flower lives beauty.
How wonderful, if only you can believe it, act on it! Only the fool, the absolute fool, is capable of it. He alone is free to plumb the depths and scour the heavens. His innocence preserves him. He asks no protection. ~ Henry Miller

THOU RIGHTEOUS AND HOLY SOVEREIGN,

In whose hand is my life
and whose are all my ways,
Keep me from fluttering about religion;
fix me firm in it,
for I am irresolute;
my decisions are smoke and vapour,
and I do not glorify thee,
or behave according to thy will;
Cut me not off before my thoughts grow to responses,
and the budding of my soul into full flower,
for thou art forbearing and good,
patient and kind.
Save me from myself,
from the artifices and deceits of sin,
from the treachery of my perverse nature,
from denying thy charge against my offences,
from a life of continual rebellion against thee,
from wrong principles, views, and ends;
for I know that all my thoughts,
affections, desires and pursuits
are alienated from thee.
I have acted as if I hated thee,
although thou art love itself;
have contrived to tempt thee to the uttermost,
to wear out thy patience;
have lived evilly in word and action.
Had I been a prince
I would long ago have crushed such a rebel;
Had I been a father
I would long since have rejected my child.
O, thou Father of my spirit,
thou King of my life,
cast me not into destruction,
drive me not from thy presence,
but wound my heart that it may be healed;
break it that thine own hand may make it whole. ~ Arthur Bennett

The path of love is its own reward. Your love itself, that is what completes you. ~ Frederick Lenz

I have loved and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter. ~ Agnes Smedley

The Creator of the galaxies lives, whispers uniquely good things about us in our hearts, and urges us to rise up and use our freedom to become compassionate peacemakers in our world. This bond of love that touches each one of our lives from the very beginning of our creation to the very end of time and beyond is our original blessing. When you and I are home in this relationship, we find ourselves in the heart of the One that Jesus addresses as Father. We reside in the intimacy of the womb of Love Itself. Looking out from the heart of Love, our own hearts bleed with compassion, because from there we are seeing as God sees. From this intimate connection with God we grow to become like the One we love. You and I, along with all members of the human family, are blessed people with the blessing of unconditional love that will never be taken away. We are also people who offer compassion to those who suffer. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

Someone has beautifully analyzed the fruit of the Spirit in Gal. 5: 22, and shown that all the graces there mentioned are but various forms of love itself. The apostle is not speaking of different fruits, but of one fruit, the fruit of the Spirit, and the various words that follow are but phrases and descriptions of the one fruit, which is love itself. Joy, which is first mentioned, is love on wings; peace, which follows, is love folding its wings, and nestling under the wings of God; longsuffering is love enduring; gentleness is love in society; goodness is love in activity, faith is love confiding; meekness is love stooping; temperance is true self-love, and the proper regard for our own real interests, which is as much the duty of love, as regard for the interests of others. ~ A.B. Simpson

Nothing except love itself touches us so intimately and forcibly as a good story told exactly right. ~ Jonathan Yardley

I know everything about love but Love itself. ~ Norman Mailer

Only love itself can explain love and lovers. ~ Rumi

Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world ~ Willa Cather

Do not believe that living together before marriage guarantees the future. By burning certain stages, you risk burning love itself. Time needs to be respected gradually, just like the expressions of love. ~ Pope Benedict XVI

Basis, n.: There has to be a moment at the beginning when you wonder whether you're inlove with the person or in love with the feeling of love itself. ~ David Levithan

The meaning of life is life itself. The reward of love is love itself. The joy of the journey is not in the destination but in the journey itself. ~ Debasish Mridha

It may be that psychologists are off-base in their preoccupation with children's need to feel that their father or some other parent loves them. It also seems valid to consider the child's desire to feel that a parent actually likes them, as love itself is so automatic and preprogrammed in a parent that it isn't a very good test of whatever it is that the typical child feels so anxious to pass the test of ~ David Foster Wallace

To understand the nature of God, it is necessary only to know the nature of love itself. To truly know love is to know and understand God; and to know God is to understand love. ~ David Hawkins

Some people say that love itself is the most powerful magic," Caitlyn said.
"But would true love make a man go against every principle that had guided his life, and make him break vows he had made to God?" Raphael
shook his head. "Simon brought Eshael here, to the château, but she would not give up her goddess and so he could not marry her. The local men
were frightened of Eshael and her strange ways. There were stories of firelight in the caves that pierce the cliffs beneath the château, and the
dancing shadows of local women that Eshael had converted to worship of her goddess.
"Simon's love for Eshael began to fade; he started to see evil in all she did and all she was. The final straw came after Eshael bore him their first
child, a daughter. When Simon discovered Eshael consecrating their child to her goddess, the last vestiges of his love turned to hatred. In his rage,
he killed her. ~ Lisa Cach

But love unexplained is clearer. When pen hasted to write, On reaching the subject of love it split in twain. When the discourse touched on the matter of love, Pen was broken and paper torn. In explaining it Reason sticks fast, as an ass in mire; Naught but Love itself can explain love and lovers! None but the sun can display the sun, If you would see it displayed, turn not away from it. Shadows, indeed, may indicate the sun's presence, But only the sun displays the light of life. Shadows induce slumber, like evening talks, But when the sun arises the "moon is split asunder." 3 In the world there is naught so wondrous as the sun, But the Sun of the soul sets not and has no yesterday. Though the material sun is unique and single, We can conceive similar suns like to it. But the Sun of the soul, beyond this firmament, No like thereof is seen in concrete or abstract.4 ~ Rumi

Whoever extolleth him as a God of love, doth not think highly enough of love itself. Did not that God want also to be judge? But the loving one loveth irrespective of reward and requital. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Because he, more than anyone, knew that sometimes, love wasn't enough. Sometimes, people changed so deeply that the change broke love itself. ~ Nalini Singh

The good news is, shame has a kryptonite. Shame cannot survive under the power of love. Love defeats shame, every time.

Love says that no matter what you did which may have caused guilt, you are loved. You are lovable. You are love itself. That is the truth. And because of that, you have nothing to be ashamed of. ~ Stephen Lovegrove

Oh, there's nothing more dangerous in life at getting hurt at than love itself. People are hurt in love affairs and never recover, more than a boxing match. ~ George Foreman

The most successful way to combat these dark clouds that come between the light of you and that which you love, is to feel that love itself will rescue you. ~ Frederick Lenz

We'll Go No More A-roving
So, we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart still be as loving,
And the moon still be as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon. ~ George Gordon Byron

Love is a sensible phenomenon, but not intelligible. You cannot know whether you love or not; you can only feel it in your heart and soul. Love as a knowable phenomenon is not an act of love itself, but a rational 'illusory' design of the intellect, an act of psychological adaptation to the environment. To support the existential meaning of your being in this environment, your intellect provides you with an artificial mental programming system. ~ Elmar Hussein

every page is an echo of Gregory the Great's well-known phrase, "Love itself is a kind of knowing."37 ~ Anonymous

Tear up that funeral shroud - you are going to smother yourself in it. I am beauty, I am youth, I am life - come to me, and together we will be Love itself ... Our life together will flow by like a dream, and it will be as one perpetual kiss. ~ Theophile Gautier

They'd lied to me and betrayed me, leaving jagged edges where all my trust had been, and I didn't like or respect or admire them any more, but still I loved them. I had no choice. I understood that, perfectly, standing in the white wilderness of snow. You can't kill love. You can't even kill it with hate. You can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can't kill love itself. Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it's a part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die. ~ Gregory David Roberts

Love is inherently intense. Intensity is an aspect of love itself, not a function of love's volume. ~ Lili Naghdi

Love itself describes its own perfection. Be speechless and listen. ~ Rumi

Love is Letting go of fear
Love itself Remains constant
only the particular body from whom we sometimes expect it may change
~ Gerald G. Jampolsky

The backside of Hollywood passion is disappointment and loneliness - and more often than not, resentment and cynicism about the nature of love itself.
Betsy and I were building more of a symphony than a pop song. ~ Donald Miller

We are just a little tiny flicker of a much larger flame that is Life itself, Consciousness itself, Being itself, Love itself, God's very self. ~ Richard Rohr

In dream you love some and not others. On waking up you find you are love itself, embracing all. Personal love, however intense and genuine, invariably binds; love in freedom is love of all. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

Love.' What a wilderness of pain, of yearning, of loss could be contained in that word. Patient and kind nonsense, is how Lady Fennimore had put it. Love wasn't for cowards; he wondered if it was for the wise. He supposed love itself made you stupid at first, or no one, no one would ever fall in love at all. ~ Julie Anne Long

The greatest reward you get from loving others is love itself. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Being a man, I may fall passionately in love with a woman someday, but I positively assert that if I had to get involved in a rivalry as intense as the love itself in order to win the object of love, I would sooner give her up by standing aloof with my hands in my pockets, no matter what pain or sacrifice I might have to endure. Others may criticize me as unmanly, cowardly, weak-willed, or whatever. But if the woman is one so wavering between her suitors that she can only be won through that kind of painful competition, I can't regard her as worth the bitter rivalry. It's far more satisfying to my conscience to have the manliness to allow my rival free play in the field of love and for me to gaze in loneliness at the scars of love than to have the pleasure of embracing by force a woman who would not willingly give me her heart. ~ Natsume Sōseki

Love is at once always absurd and never absurd; the more grotesque its form, the more love itself confers a certain dignity on the circumstances of those it torments. ~ Anthony Powell

Let your will burn in this fire so that it takes you nowhere else. Let your self be burned in this fire of eternity, love and peace. Don't be afraid of this fire, it is love itself. This desire for freedom is the fire of love! ~ H.W.L. Poonja

Do not seek anywhere but within for love. Do not build walls preventing love from entering, rather build an aura around you that is penetrable to allow a flow of love to constantly go through you. We are but a mere vessel of love. This vessel is connected to all things. Love is channeled through all these streams and it is constantly flowing. If an attempt is made to contain this love, it will break the dam thus causing an overwhelming amount of grief and sense of drowning. When love is allowed to flow naturally without trying to possess it, it gives one all that is needed. It protects you. It serves you. It guides you. And most of all it loves you. Love is meant to flow. Embrace the flow. It is always going through you. Do not ever doubt it. Love connects us all. The all is love itself, so that includes you. You are never without love. In fact, you ARE love. ~ Jason Micheal Ratliff

For nothing is more fulfilling than love itself ~ Nicholas Sparks

Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back? ~ Maggie Nelson

The love song must be born into the realm of the irrational, absurd, the distracted, the melancholic, the obsessive, the insane for the love song is the noise of love itself and love is, of course, a form of madness. ~ Nick Cave

Even the most honorable of men know nothing of what love means to a woman. They feel pleasure, and that is their aim. A woman believes that love itself is her whole aim and pleasure merely one branch of a vast tree, deeply rooted in her heart. She believes it is her profound duty to care for this tree, nourish it each day, and give all of its fruits exclusively to one man and to her children. This in itself demands a sacrifice that men cannot comprehend. ~ James Tipton

I am the mystery of Love itself, the lust and spirit of unity aflame with the infinite passion for the Unknown. Thus are all things made one, in me, by virtue of my secret force; and in this light there is the unspeakable joy, the ineffable bliss, the orgasmic ecstasy of the ages. ~ David Cherubim

How do we imagine a great love?
Perhaps something along the lines of Gone with the Wind or Titanic is what comes to mind. But those aren't really about love itself, but about a situation. Everything becomes more grand when it takes place in the context of a civil war, a shipwreck, or natural catastrophe. But that is like judging the painting by the frame. That the Mona Lisa should be judged a masterpiece largely because of the carvings that surround it.
Love is love. In the dramatic stories, the people involved are physically willing to give up their lives for each other, but that is exactly what happens in the great but everyday love also. You give your lives to each other the whole way and every day, until death. ~ John Ajvide Lindqvist

Many have said much about love, but you will find love itself only if you seek it among the disciples of Christ. For only they have true Love as love's teacher. 'Though I have the gift of prophecy', says St. Paul, 'and know all mysteries and all knowledge? and have no love, it profits me nothing' (I Cor. 13:2-3). He who possesses love possesses God Himself, for 'God is love' (I Jn. 4:8). To Him be glory throughout the ages. Amen. ~ Maximus The Confessor

Love is the astrolabe of God's mysteries.
A lover may be drawn to this love or that love,
but finally he is drawn to the Sovereign of Love.
However much we describe and explain love,
when we fall in love we are ashamed of our words.
Explanation by the tongue makes most things clear,
but love unexplained is clearer.
When the pen came to the subject of love, it broke.
When the discourse reached the topic of love,
the pen split and the paper tore.
If intellect tries to explain it,
it falls helpless as a donkey on a muddy trail;
only Love itself can explain love and lovers!
The proof of the sun is the sun itself.
If you wish to see it, don't turn away from it. ~ Rumi

That is what grace does. It comes as a surprise; it lingers in the rare atmosphere of love, since love itself is breathed by it and love by it is made manifest. This expression of love is "ecstasy" in the Greek meaning of that word: to "stand outside" the ordinary, outside predetermined marital contracts, outside the systematic and the expected ~ Walter Wangerin Jr.

I got interested in the idea that love is often used as a kind of blanket explanation for things. I mean, battered wives, for instance: "Why did you go back to him?" "Oh, I loved him." "Why did you embezzle fifteen million pounds and run away to the other side of the world?" "Oh, well, because I was in love." All that and then you don't ask anything else. I thought if I just say, these people needed love and they found it, then it kind of explained it away. I wanted to look at their behaviour and how love can inspire the best and the very worst in human behaviour but love itself is not behaviour. So I avoided the word 'love' until the very end and it's the last word in the novel. I wanted to explore what people will do when they're in such terrible need of love. If there was a big idea then that was it. Then, of course, I hope that if it's a story worth reading it's the characters themselves who make you want to read it, not the big idea. I don't think a big idea drives a novel usually. Something else has to engage you on a much more kind of personal level. ~ Morag Joss

She was not certain what she wanted from life, or what to expect from it, for she had seen so little of it, but she was sure that in some way - because she willed it to be so - her wants and her expectations were the same.
For a while after their marriage she was in such demand that it was not unpleasant when he fell asleep. Presently, however, he began sleeping all night, and it was then she awoke more frequently, and looked into the darkness, wondering about the nature of men, doubtful of the future, until at last there came a night when she shook her husband awake and spoke of her own desire. Affably he placed one of his long white arms around her waist; she turned to him then, contentedly, expectantly, and secure. However, nothing else occurred, and in a few minutes he had gone back to sleep.
This was the night Mrs. Bridge concluded that while marriage might be an equitable affair, love itself was not. ~ Evan S. Connell

For many minutes, we did nothing but touch each other and absorb the sensation into our skin, as if love itself were a tangible blanket wrapping us in an unbreakable bond. ~ Juliette Cross

On the Promise of the Present The eternal self dwells in eternity, and eternity intersects linear time at only one point: the present. Who you are in this moment, therefore, is who you truly are. And who you are is love itself. From that essential point of perfect being, created anew by God in every instant, miracles flow naturally. Love interrupts the past and opens the future to new probabilities. No matter who you are, no matter how young or old you are, in the present, all things are possible. ~ Marianne Williamson

Whether you love God or you love a human being, if you love enough you will come into the presence of Love itself. ~ Rumi

~ The One Who Loves You As You Are ~


As beautiful as a starlit sky

As delicate as a lotus blossom

As deep as still clear water

As priceless as your soul

As mysterious as the universe

As loving as love itself

Know this,

You are worthy to be truly loved

You are worth fighting for! ~ R. Alan Woods

However much I might try to expound or explain Love, when I come to Love itself, I am ashamed of my explanations ... Love alone can explain the mysteries of love and lovers. ~ Rumi

I was not yet in love, but I was in love with love itself; and I sought for something to love, since I loved nothing. ~ Augustine Of Hippo

The very essence of love is love itself without any other expectation. ~ Debasish Mridha

When love itself comes to kiss you, don't hold back! ~ Rumi

How was it that no one had ever told her that it was not love itself, but its treacherous gatekeepers which made the greatest demands on your courage: the panic of acknowledging it; the terror of declaring it; the fear of being rebuffed? Why had no one told her that love's twin was not hate but cowardice? ~ Amitav Ghosh

The mind forgets, but the heart will always remember. And what is the heart's memory but love itself? ~ Tan Twan Eng

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy. ~ Thomas Merton

I would have told her then she was the only thing that I could
love in this dying world but the simple word "love" itself already died and went away. ~ Marilyn Monroe

Her eyes seemed to question, to commiserate, to be, for a second, love itself. ~ Virginia Woolf

There is no Love greater than Love with no object. For then you, yourself, have become love, itself. ~ Rumi

There has to be a moment at the beginning where you wonder whether you're in love with the person or in love with the feeling of love itself.
If the moment doesn't pass, that's it - you're done.
And if the moment does pass, it never goes that far. It stands in the distance, ready for whenever you want it back. Sometimes it's even there when you thought you were searching for something else, like an escape route, or your lovers' face. ~ David Levithan

The cure for love is the love itself. ~ Debasish Mridha

When you are willing to shine the light of love onto the parts that you are not proud of - onto the unaccepted parts, the unloved parts, the unwanted emotions, into all the darkened corners of your soul - love will suffuse them, embrace them, until you are left as nothing but love itself. Love arises when you expose everything. ~ Brandon Bays

Because by now Elinor had understood this, too: A longing for books was nothing compared with what you could feel for human beings. The books told you about that feeling. The books spoke of love, and it was wonderful to listen to them, but they were no substitute for love itself. They couldn't kiss her like Meggie, they couldn't hug her like Resa, they couldn't laugh like Mortimer. Poor books, poor Elinor. ~ Cornelia Funke

Even as the angry vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him ... Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness ... And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives along with the command, the love itself. ~ Corrie Ten Boom

When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No ... don't blush. I am telling you some truths. For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away. Doesn't sound very exciting, does it? But it is! ~ Louis De Bernieres

A token of love comes in a box because love itself cannot be contained. ~ Binnie Kirshenbaum

Yet I can tell you that there was a lonely and untenanted corner of my heart that I'd never known was there - and Frank moved right into it. Holding him in my heart made me feel like I belonged to love itself. Although we never lived together or shared a bed, he was always a part of me. I saved stories for him all week, so I would have good things to tell him. I asked for his opinions, because I respected his ethics. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

It was the purest love without purpose other than love itself. Without tenure or jealousy. ~ Luis Sepulveda