The Act Of Loving Quotes

Can one have love? If we could, love would need to be a thing, a substance that one can have, own, possess. The truth is, there is no such thing as "love." "Love" is abstraction, perhaps a goddess or an alien being, although nobody has ever seen this goddess. In reality, there exists only the act of loving. To love is a productive activity. It implies caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, the tree, the painting, the idea. It means bringing to life, increasing his/her/its aliveness. It is a process, self-renewing and self-increasing. ~ Erich Fromm

You will be told that the best way to love is in the absence of yourself. But listen to me when I say, that the more treasures within you that you see and you find, the more purely you will be able to love another. We do not love properly when we have no treasures to give; but seeing the cave full of treasures within us, we love as the gods do. ~ C. JoyBell C.

The men in my life have always been the folks who are wary of using the word 'love' lightly. They are wary because they believe women make too much of love. And they know that what we think love means is not always what they believe it means. Our confusion about what we mean when we use the word 'love' is the source of our difficulty in loving. If our society had a commonly held understanding of the meaning of love, the act of loving would not be so mystifying. ~ Bell Hooks

Love is the only way of knowledge, which in the act of union answers my quest. In the act of loving, of giving myself, in the act of penetrating the other person, I find myself, I discover myself, I discover us both, I discover man. ~ Erich Fromm

The legacy of the Wilderness Act is a legacy of care. It is the act of loving beyond ourselves, beyond our own species, beyond our own time. To honor wildlands and wild lives that we may never see, much less understand, is to acknowledge the world does not revolve around us. The Wilderness Act is an act of respect that protects the land and ourselves from our own annihilation. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

What she felt for Jena hadn't been love. She knew that now, but it had been something that had felt bewilderingly, beautifully, deceptively like it. And though it had ended in horror and betrayal, she had learned something from Jena, too. Loving someone didn't mean you could save them, and you didn't save yourself simply by the act of loving. ~ Vic James

The act of loving is an act of self-evolution even when the purpose of the act is someone else's growth. ~ M. Scott Peck

There is only one passion which satisfies man's need to unite himself with the world, and to acquire at the same time a sense of integrity and individuality, and this is love. Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self. It is an experience of sharing, of communion, which permits the full unfolding of one's own inner activity. The experience of love does away with the necessity of illusions. There is no need to inflate the image of the other person, or of myself, since the reality of active sharing and loving permits me to transcend my individualized existence, and at the same time to experience myself as the bearer of the active powers which constitute the act of loving. What ~ Erich Fromm

Love can only be found through the act of loving. ~ Paulo Coelho

[F]or when you get in love you are made all over again. The person who loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass. So there are two you's, the one you create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't be any difference between the two you's or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment. ~ Robert Penn Warren

We can never know in the beginning, in giving ourselves to a person, to a work, to a marriage or to a cause, exactly what kind of love we are involved with. When we demand a certain specific kind of reciprocation before the revelation has flowered completely we find our selves disappointed and bereaved and in that grief may miss the particular form of love that is actually possible but that did not meet our initial and too specific expectations. Feeling bereft we take our identity as one who is disappointed in love, our almost proud disappointment preventing us from seeing the lack of reciprocation from the person or the situation as simply a difficult invitation into a deeper and as yet unrecognizable form of affection.

The act of loving itself, always becomes a path of humble apprenticeship, not only in following its difficult way and discovering its different forms of humility and beautiful abasement but strangely, through its fierce introduction to all its many astonishing and different forms, where we are asked continually and against our will, to give in so many different ways, without knowing exactly, or in what way, when or how, the mysterious gift will be returned. ~ David Whyte

On the other hand, maybe what attracts us aren't the stories of falling apart so much as the stories of self-creation. The falling apart stuff is just a byproduct, a hazard of the trade. Maybe what I loved about Camille Claudel was what she created out of what she smashed to bits. How did a bourgeois girl become an artist and a woman? What was the female equivalent of the Great Man? If it didn't exist, why not? Who said it didn't? Who said it couldn't? What were the conditions that made it so hard? Rodin was the image Claudel identified with and against which she defined herself. Scott was this image for Zelda. A woman could not be a great artist and have a traditional marriage - not unless her husband was a Leonard Woolf. One boyfriend I had in college used to joke, 'Only one artist in the family,' meaning not me. I didn't get it then, but I get it now. There was always something self-annihilating in the act of loving, for a girl with creative aspirations - always - but far more then than now. The message, invariably, was that youthful passions lead to middle-age breakdowns, so choose your institution wisely. Marriage or the nuthouse. One or the other. It started to dawn on me that it wasn't that I was attracted to stories about girls who went mad, I was attracted to stories about girls with ambitions who wound up institutionalized. Getting locked up was not the result of adventure, it was the price you paid for adventure, it was your punishment. I had mistaken correlation f ~ Carina Chocano

Carry out a random act of kindness, with no expectation of reward, safe in the knowledge that one day someone might do the same for you. ~ Diana Princess Of Wales

Everything could end at any moment. The difference between life and death was one breath, one second, one act. And that meant that life was worth everything, every minute of every day. ~ Gwenda Bond

That room was Rolandsen's world. Rolandsen was not just irresponsibility and inebriation, he was also great thinker and inventor. There was a smell of acids that permeated the corridor and came to the notice of every visitor. Rolandsen made no secret of the fact that he had all these medicaments there solely to disguise the aroma of all the brandy he consumed. But this was part of an act designed purely to give himself an air of inscrutability. ~ Knut Hamsun

Now that I'm staring down the barrel of the last act of my life, I'm less excited about control and solo effort, and I resent the way the business aspects interfere with my space for creative writing. ~ David Knopfler

I don't like categorizing stuff, but women's roles all through history have been to act as hierophant or someone who's guarded the secrets or guarded the temple. I'm a girl doing what guys usually did, the way that I look, the goals and kinds of things I want to help achieve through rock. It's more heroic stuff and heroic stuff has been traditionally male. Like Hendrix and Jim Morrison and all those people. I mean, Jim Morrison was trying to elevate the word; he was the poet in rock & roll before me. He was an academic poet. Lou Reed
another academic poet. I'm more like down-to-earth than them guys ~ Patti Smith

It should be possible to exist with only a short shelf of books, to read and give away. After all - we may not open a book, once read, for ten years or more. But the act of reading has made it part of us - to relinquish it would be to lose an extension of our being. ~ Pam Brown

Your purpose is to act on the resources God gives you. If God gives you a bucket of fish, you have to distribute those fish. If you don't, they're going to rot, attract a bunch of flies, and start stinking up your soul. ~ Russell Simmons

The first part of a good work is the will, the second is vigorous effort in the doing of it. God is the author of both. It is, therefore, robbery from God to arrogate anything to ourselves, either in the will or the act. ~ John Calvin

The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first. ~ Jim Morrison

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth. ~ Leonard E. Read

An act of a dictatorship is an act of a civil war - Freedom to the people. ~ Jim

Respect for human rights is not social work; it is not merely an act of compassion. It is the first obligation of government and the source of its legitimacy. ~ Ronald Reagan

They were sorting, or classifying. It's easy-anyone dressed funny is the enemy, especially if they reject your supremacy or do not acknowledge school as entertainment. If the enemy tries to look like you and act like you, only in more affordable clothes, that person is still the enemy, only of a more contemptible, less terrifying variety- ~ Hilary Thayer Hamann

I should like to use another word: 'audience' or 'reader' or 'listener' seems inadequate. I suggest the old word 'witness,' which includes the act of seeing and knowing by personal experience, as well as the act of giving evidence. ~ Muriel Rukeyser

I want to live so fully in the Spirit that ... every act of my life may be an act of worship. ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer

We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsman of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of chance. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

A lot of stuff, I've noticed, gets manipulated by writers when it's shown on television - even so-called reality television - and makes us think we're supposed to think and act and look certain ways, when the true reality is totally the opposite. Often there's no "right way" to look or think or act, but because we've been so conditioned by the media to think so, we actually mistrust our own better judgment. ~ Meg Cabot

The first mindfulness training: reverence for life Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I am committed to cultivating the insight of interbeing, compassion, and learning ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals. I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to support any act of killing in the world, in my thinking, or in my way of life. Seeing that harmful actions arise from anger, fear, greed, and intolerance, which in turn come from dualistic and discriminative thinking, I will cultivate openness, nondiscrimination, and nonattachment to views in order to transform violence, fanaticism, and dogmatism in myself and in the world. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

All men are, or ought to be free, possessing unalienable rights, and the high and noble qualifications of the laws of nature and of self-preservation, to think, and act, and say as they please, while they maintain a due respect to the rights and privileges of all other creatures, infringing upon none. ~ Joseph Smith Jr.

Our behavioral patterns are exceedingly complex, and psychology is a young science. The scope of our behavioral wisdom exceeds the breadth of our explicit interpretation. We act, even instruct, and yet do not understand. How can we do what we cannot explain? ~ Jordan B. Peterson

If the entity allows [the relationships with individuals] to produce a hardening of the heart, or of a determination to get even, or of those conditions that hold for discontent, malice, or otherwise, these must surely bring the destructive forces that build that which the entity must meet; for, in truth, that builded in the mental forces of a body is as active in the experiences as must come to the entity as were done in the very material act ... ~ Edgar Cayce

Anger and the like are attributed to God on account of a similitude of effect. Thus, because to punish is properly the act of an angry man, God's punishment is metaphorically spoken of as His anger. ~ Thomas Aquinas

Drugs, hard. Under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, the law was changed in the United Kingdom to ensure that the production and supply of dangerous drugs should henceforth be in the hands of criminal organisations. Some people have argued that this is not an ideal arrangement. ~ William Donaldson

WHITLOCK 2 (to VRIL):
In my humble opinion,
Be off to oblivion!
Their tears crocodilian
Will dry here below.

Your act is vaudevillian,
Your faults are octillion!
Your manners reptilian
Would shock a Brazilian!
Alas, but a Vrillian's a pitiful beau!
A despicable, fickle, unprintable foe!

LADY CADENCE: (still in the grip of VRIL) Mr. Cartwright, my most mannered acquaintances hail from Brazil.

WHITLOCK 2: My apologies, Your Ladyship. It's a difficult rhyme. ~ Bill Powell

In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust. ~ Jennifer Birkett

War is an act of force, and to the application of that force there is no limit. Each of the adversaries forces the hand of the other, and a reciprocal action results which in theory can have no limit ... ~ Carl Von Clausewitz

I really don't care much about what you do, where you're from, the size of your bank account, or even where you went to school. Show me kindness, respect, act with integrity, and you'll have a fan and a friend for life. ~ Charles F. Glassman

Average reality begins to rot and stink as soon as the act of individual creation ceases to animate a subjectively perceived texture. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

My husband obstinately believed in the simplicity of commitment, not as default but as an act of will, a decision. We choose to stay in the lives we ourselves have chosen.
Vogue Magazine ~ Marcia DeSanctis

We are internally related to everything, not [just] externally related. Consciousness is an internal relationship to the whole, we take in the whole, and we act toward the whole. Whatever we have taken in determines basically what we are. Wholeness is a kind of attitude or approach to the whole of life. If we can have a coherent approach to reality then reality will respond coherently to us. ~ David Bohm

But to interpret the Islamic waqf as an 'act' of citizenship is at best unconventional. This argument requires changing our modern understanding of citizenship as contractual status. It requires considering the ways in which the concept of citizenship has evolved through history and how it enabled a division between modern and traditional and occidental and oriental.2 Once we fulfill these requirements, new avenues of thought open up through which we can interpret Islamic waqfs as acts of citizenship. ~ Pascale Gazaleh

As you begin changing your thinking, start immediately to change your behavior. Begin to act the part of the person you would like to become. Take action on your behavior. Too many people want to feel, then take action. This never works. ~ John C. Maxwell

Since I neither want not can influence the events of the world, my mission is to preserve the internal integrity and equilibrium of my mind; that will be in which the manor in which I recover the purity of the original act; I shall be my own citadel, and to it I shall retire to protect myself against a hostile and corrupt world. I shall be my own citadel and, within it, my own and only citizen. ~ Carlos Fuentes

A narcissistic mother sees her daughter, more than her son, as a reflection and extension of herself rather than as a separate person with her own identity. She puts pressure on her daughter to act and react to the world and her surroundings in the exact manner that Mom would, rather than in a way that feels right for the daughter. Thus, the daughter is always scrambling to find the "right" way to respond to ~ Karyl McBride

Well, I will scourge those apes, And to these courteous eyes oppose a mirror, As large as is the stage whereon we act; Where they shall see the time's deformity Anatomised in every nerve, and sinew, With constant courage, and contempt of fear. ~ Ben Jonson

K.R. understands the distinction between pressure and stress. He cites the famous image of William Tell shooting an apple off his son's head: "In this scenario, William Tell feels pressure. His son feels stress." K.R> keeps the pressure on his team to act, but doesn't create stress by holding them accountable for outcomes beyond their control. ~ Liz Weiseman

Drawing architecture is a "schizoid" act: it involves reducing the world to a piece of paper. ~ Eduardo Souto De Moura

I certainly was performing before my writing was published, because I was performing when I was very young. And the thing is I'm very comfortable on stage, so a large portion of my act did come from ad-libs. ~ Ricky Jay

Today it is becoming harder to speak out, with the inception of the Patriot Act, the president has legislated free speech to be a crime. ~ Frank Serpico

Salvation, the prophets tell us, is preconditioned by repentance. The redeeming act of God waits upon man's initiative. ~ Abba Eban

The initial stage, the act of conceiving or inventing a theory, seems to me neither to call for logical analysis nor to be susceptible of it. ~ Karl Popper

It is the act of a coward to wish for death. ~ Ovid

The mere act of sharing something can, in other words, be a form of self-expression. ~ Tom Standage