Community is a sign that love is possible in a materialistic world where people so often either ignore or fight each other. It is a sign that we don't need a lot of money to be happy--in fact, the opposite.
Jean VanierRead
We all know well that we can do things for others and in the process crush them, making them feel that they are incapable of doing things by themselves. To love someone is to reveal to them their capacities for life, the light that is shining in them.
Interpretation
What this quote means
True love empowers others rather than diminishes their self-worth.
This quote emphasizes that love should be about enhancing the dignity and capabilities of others rather than overshadowing them. It suggests that when you genuinely love someone, you help them recognize and develop their potential, allowing their own light to shine rather than suppressing it through dependency or control.
Themes
LoveEmpowermentCapacitySupportRelationships
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a wedding speech to emphasize the supportive nature of love.
More from Jean Vanier
All quotes →One of the marvelous things about community is that it enables us to welcome and help people in a way we couldn't as individuals. When we pool our strength and share the work and responsibility, we can welcome many people, even those in deep distress, and perhaps help them find self-confidence and inner healing.
Jean VanierRead
True peace can rarely be imposed from the outside; it must be born within and between communities through meetings and dialogue and then carried outward.
Jean VanierRead
In any case, community is not about perfect people. It is about people who are bonded to each other, each of whom is a mixture of good and bad, darkness and light, love and hate.
Jean VanierRead
We have to remind ourselves constantly that we are not saviours. We are simply a tiny sign, among thousands of others, that love is possible, that the world is not condemned to a struggle between oppressors and oppressed, that class and racial warfare is not inevitable.
Jean VanierRead
When we begin to believe that there is greater joy in working with and for others, rather than just for ourselves, then our society will truly become a place of celebration.
Jean VanierRead
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What were all the world's alarms To mighty Paris when he found Sleep upon a golden bed That first dawn in Helen's arms?
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In this is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
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I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness. We made love in nothing places and turned the lights off. It felt like crying. We could not look at each other. It always had to be from behind. Like that first time. And I knew he wasn't thinking of me. He squeezed my sides so hard, and pushed so hard. Like he was trying to push me through to somewhere else. Why does anyone ever make love?
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The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.
Christopher HitchensRead
It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who He is, and who we are.
Thomas MertonRead
God's love has a width, length, height, and depth, but we will never reach the end of it. Our capacity to experience God's love will be exhausted long before God's capacity to give it is strained. The picture of having Christ dwell inside us by faith presents us with compelling and comforting possibilities. What Christ does in us and through us will always be 'exceedingly abundantly above all we ask or think.'
Max LucadoRead