“To be loved and to love is almost spiritual breathing. The body cannot live without breath, and the spirit cannot live without love.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 236)
“In the struggle against injustice, it’s easy to let bitterness and hatred harden your heart. As Marcus Aurelius wrote: ‘What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.’ When we close ourselves off to love and hope, we naturally experience less love and hope. The Bible reminds us that ‘whoever hardens their heart falls into trouble.’ And James Baldwin, that ‘hatred…has never failed to destroy the men who hated.’ Hatred corrodes. It takes you south, backward, down, down to depths. Love, on the other hand, protects, trusts, hopes, preserves. Love does not fail. It takes you north, it leads you forward. It always wins. Which way are you going? Is your heart growing or shrinking? Is your love and compassion and connection for other people, your hope for a better future, growing or shrinking?”
Ryan Holiday
“To me, smoking might be the most attractive activity a woman (or anyone for that matter) can do. Yet, the irony in this attraction is that if I were to fall in love with a woman who smoked, I’d want them to stop the disgusting habit immediately. Perhaps there is a metaphor in there for love. Where people fuck up tragically in love is that they fall in love with someone and then immediately attempt to make them someone else.”
Cole Schafer
“Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (Page 13)
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same oaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.”
“Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (Page 10)
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To know the pain of too much tenderness
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstacy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.”
“Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (Page 9)
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.”
“Great song is possible, great richness is possible, but one has to start exploring. And the best way to explore the song of one’s life is to love; that is the very methodology. Just as logic is the methodology of science, love is the methodology of the spirit. Just as logic makes you capable of going deeper and deeper into matter, love makes you capable of going deeper and deeper into consciousness. And the deeper you go, the deeper songs are released. When one has reached the very core of one’s being, the whole of life becomes a celebration, an utter celebration.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 215)
“I talked about how love was an action, an instinct, a response roused by unplanned moments and small gestures, an inconvenience in someone else’s favor. How I felt it most when he drove up to New York after work at three in the morning just to hold me in a warehouse in Brooklyn after I’d discovered my mother was sick. The many times these months he’d flown three thousand miles whenever I needed him. While he listened patiently through the five calls a day I’d been making since June.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 143)
“Food was how my mother expressed her love. No matter how critical or cruel she could seem—constantly pushing me to meet her intractable expectations—I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 4)
“You could eat in the finest restaurants, you could partake in every sensual pleasure, you could sing on stage in São Paulo to twenty thousand people, you could soak up whole thunderstorms of applause, you could travel to the ends of the Earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet, you could win Olympic medals, but this was all meaningless without love.”
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 248)
