The gulls who scorn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere, slowly. Those who put aside travel for the sake of perfection go anywhere, instantly.
Richard BachRead
When we come to the last moment of this lifetime and we look back across it, the only thing that's going to matter is 'What is the quality of our love?'
Interpretation
What this quote means
The significance of our lives will be measured by the love we shared with others.
This quote emphasizes that at the end of our lives, the most important aspect we will reflect on is the quality of love we've given and received. It suggests that material achievements and successes will pale in comparison to the relationships and deep connections formed through love.
Themes
LoveLifeReflectionRelationshipsQuality
In practice
Example use cases
In a eulogy, one could highlight the importance of love in the deceased's life by referencing this quote.
More from Richard Bach
All quotes →Jonathan Livingston Seagull . . . was no ordinary bird. Most gulls don't bother_x000D_ _x000D_ to learn more than the simplest facts of flight how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this_x000D_ _x000D_ gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More than anything else,_x000D_ _x000D_ Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly.
Richard BachRead
True love stories never have endings.
Richard BachRead
We wait all these years to find someone who understands us, I thought, someone who accepts us as we are, someone with a wizard's power to melt stone to sunlight, who can bring us happiness in spite of trials, who can face our dragons in the night, who can transform us into the soul we choose to be. Just yesterday I found that magical Someone is the face we see in the mirror: It's us and our homemade masks.
Richard BachRead
From time to time it's fun to close our eyes, and in that dark say to ourselves, 'I am the sorcerer, and when I open my eyes I shall see a world that I have created, and for which I and only I am completely responsible.' Slowly then, eyelids open like curtains lifting stage-center. And sure enough, there's our world, just the way we've built it.
Richard BachRead
If our body is a perfect expression of our thought about body, and if our thought about body is that it’s condition has everything to do with inner image and nothing to do with time, then we don’t have to be impatient for being too young or frightened of being too old.
Richard BachRead
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But one kiss levitates above all the others. The intersection of function and desire. The I do kiss. The I’ll love you through a brick wall kiss. Even when I’m dead, I’ll swim through the Earth, like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.
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Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Why? Because every human being has a root in the Unity, and to reject the minutest particle of the Unity is to reject it all.
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The knowledge that she could learn to love a man had always meant more to her than loving him effortlessly, more even than falling in love, and that was why she now felt that she was on the threshold of a new life, a happiness bound to endure for a very long time.
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She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.
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