Quotes on Those We Love

It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.

I told him the truth, that I loved him and didn't regret anything about our lives together. But do we ever 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God' as my father used to say, to those we love? Or even to ourselves? Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven't been?

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.

Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

Grief can be a slow ache that never seems to stop rising, yet as we grieve, those we love mysteriously become more and more a part of who we are.

There is perhaps no surer mark of folly, than to attempt to correct natural infirmities of those we love.

Absence, like death, sets a seal on the image of those we love: we cannot realize the intervening changes which time may have effected.

We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another.

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

To suppress minority thinking and minority expression would tend to freeze society and prevent progress. Now more than ever we must keep in the forefront of our minds the fact that whenever we take away the liberties of those we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love.

One word _x000D_ _x000D_ Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:_x000D_ _x000D_ That word is love.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear.

Absence from those we love is self from self - a deadly banishment.

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands.

Love is a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery.

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly _x000D_ themselves.

It is essential that our love be liberating, not possessive. We must at all times give those we love the freedom to be themselves. Love affirms the other as other. It does not possess and manipulate another as mine.

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.