Great Throughts Treasury

"Worse than hatred is pretense of love." - Pliny the Younger, full name Casus Plinius Caecilius Secundus, born Gaius Caecilius or Gaius Caecilius Cilo NULL

"It is sound, I think, to find the primal source of Love in a tendency of the Soul towards pure beauty, in a recognition, in a kinship, in an unreasoned consciousness of friendly relation." - Plotinus NULL

"Be patient in little things. Learn to bear the every-day trials and annoyances of life quietly and calmly, and then, when unforeseen trouble or calamity comes, your strength will not forsake you. There is much difference between genuine patience and sullen endurance, as between the smile of love, and the malicious gnashing of the teeth." - William Swan Plumer

"Love, hope and joy, fair pleasure’s smiling train, hate fear and grief, the family of pain; these mix’d with art, and to due bounds confin’d, make and maintain the balance of the mind." - Alexander Pope

"Success breeds conservatism, and that means a love affair with the status quo and an aversion to change." - Frank Popoff or Popov

"Compulsion hardly restores right; love yields all things." - Jane Porter

"Self-love leads men of narrow minds to measure all mankind by their own capacity." - Jane Porter

"My father had always said that there are four things a child needs - plenty of love, nourishing food, regular sleep, and lots of soap and water - and after those, what he needs most is some intelligent neglect." - Ivy Baker Priest

"When you love you are not wise: when you are wise you do not love." - Publius Syrus

"Gaze not on beauty too much, lest it blast thee; nor too long, lest it blind thee; nor too near, lest it burn thee. If thou like it, it deceives thee; if thou love it, it disturbs thee; if thou hunt after it, it destroys thee. If virtue accompany it, it is the heart’s paradise; if vice associate it, it is the soul’s purgatory. It is the wise man’s bonfire, and the fool’s furnace." - Francis Quarles

"The height of all philosophy is to know thyself; and the end of this knowledge is to know God. Know thyself, that thou mayest know God; and know God, that thou mayest love him and be like him. In the one thou art initiated into wisdom; and in the other perfected in it." - Francis Quarles

"Man can be whole only when he comprises both love and fear." - Zadok ha-Kohen Rabinowitz of Lublin

"Love means giving one’s self to another person fully, not just physically. When two people really love each other, this helps them to stay alive and grow. One must be loved to grow. Love’s such a precious and fragile thing that when it comes we have to hold on tightly. And when it comes, we’re very lucky because for some it never comes at all. If you have love, you’re wealthy in a way that can never be measured." - Nancy Reagan, born Anne Frances Robbins

"Look at me - I am poor and naked, but I am the chief of the nation. We do not want riches, but we do want to train our children right. Riches would do us no good. We could not take them with us to the other world. We do not want riches. We want peace and love." - Red Cloud, fully Maȟpíya Lúta in Lakota NULL

"Your life will be good and secure when aliveness will mean more to you than security; love more than money; your freedom more than partyline line or public opinion; when the mood of Beethoven or Bach will be the mood of your total existence; when the teachers of your children will be better paid than the politicians." - Wilhelm Reich

"The man who has never made a fool of himself in love will never be wise in love." - Theodor Reik

"It is a delightful thought that, during the familiarity of constant proximity, the heart gathers up in silence the nutriment of love, as the diamond, even beneath the water, imbibes the light it emits. Time, which deadens hatred, secretly strengthens love." -

"We learn our virtues from the friends who love us; our faults from the enemy who hates us. We cannot easily discover our real character from a friend. He is a mirror, on which the warmth of our breath impedes the clearness of the reflection." -

"Why is it that a blessing only when it is lost cuts as deep into the heart as a sharp diamond? Why must we first weep before we can love so deeply that our hearts ache?" -

"The meaning of life has something to do with realizing that our essence is perfect love, then going on to live our lives upon that truth, experiencing each day as a miracle and every act as sacred." - Kenneth Ring

"Tenderness is the infancy of love." -

"The world is governed by love, self-love." -

"It is not this earth, nor the men who inhabit it, nor the sphere of our legitimate activity, that we may not love; but the way in which the love is given, which constitutes worldliness." -

"Remorse is the consciousness of doing wrong with no sense of love; penitence the same consciousness with the feeling of sorrow and tenderness added." -

"You reap what you sow - not something else, but that. An act of love makes the soul more loving. A deed of humbleness deepens humbleness. The thing reaped is the very thing sown, multiplied a hundred fold. You have sown a seed of life, you reap life everlasting." -

"Selfishness, not love, is the actuating motive of the gallant." - Madame Roland, Jeanne Manon Philon, born Marie-Jeanne Phlipon

"Who does not sufficiently hate vice, does not sufficiently love virtue." -

"It is then certain that compassion is a natural feeling, which, by moderating the violence of love of self in each individual, contributes to the preservation of the whole species." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"I have found that if you love life, life will love you back." - Arthur Rubenstein

"The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love." -

"Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love." -

"I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive... But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting." -

"Since power over human beings is shown in making them do what they would rather not do, the man who is actuated by love of power is more apt to inflict pain than to permit pleasure." -

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind... the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be." -

"Love is an egotism of two." -

"Love makes of the wisest man a fool, and of the most foolish woman, a sage." - Moritz Saphir, fully Moritz Gottlieb Saphir, born Moses Saphir

"All weaknesses are just fabrications of mind. If I am not happy with myself, how can you make me happy? It takes time to see that my unhappiness stems from myself and not from you. We love to blame others as the source of our unhappiness because that is how we feel good about ourselves. But when we go deeper, we realize that no one in the whole world can make us happy or unhappy. It depends on our own integrity." - Shantananda Saraswathi, fully Swami Shantananda Saraswathi, born Chandrashekar

"Any simple act is very, very great if you do it with love and oneness... The greatest art of life is to feel happy by making someone else happy and thereby realize the mystical thread of life. Be fearless, be disciplined, be meditative, and be self-less. That will make you happy and playful." - Shantananda Saraswathi, fully Swami Shantananda Saraswathi, born Chandrashekar

"To think out in every implication the ethic of love for all creation - this is the difficult task which confronts our age." - Albert Schweitzer

"What we call love is in its essence Reverence for Life. All material and spiritual values are values only insofar as they serve the maintenance of life at its highest level and furtherance of life. Ethics are boundless in their domain and limitless in their demands. They are concerned with all living things that come into our sphere." - Albert Schweitzer

"Love means not ever having to say you’re sorry." -

"Love is like the moon; when it does not increase it decreases." - Joseph Alexandre Pierre Ségur, Vicomte de

"‘Rehearse death.’ To say this is to tell a person to rehearse his freedom. A person who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. He is above, or at any rate beyond the reach of, all political powers. What are prisons, warders, bars to him? He has an open door. There is but one chain holding us in fetters, and that is our love of life. There is no need to cast this love out altogether, but it does need to be lessened somewhat so that, in the event of circumstances ever demanding this, nothing may stand in the way of our being prepared to do at once what we must do at some time or other." -

"Love cannot be mixed with fear." -

"No power is greater than true love." -

"Solitude and company may be allowed to take their turns: the one creates in us the love of mankind, the other that of ourselves; solitude relieves us when we are sick of company, and conversation when we are weary of being alone, so that the one cures the other. There is no man so miserable as he that is at a loss how to use his time." -

"There is no real love of virtue without the knowledge of public good." - Lord Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury

"We usually fall asleep in our relationships... not because we are tired of love but so we can dream of new relationships. Life, however, is a work in progress, and love's challenge is not to see people as they once were but as they might be. People who grow old can also grow love." - Noah benShea

"There is no surer formula for discontent than to try to satisfy our cravings for the ocean of Infinite Love from the teacup of finite satisfactions." - Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen

"The more I can love everything - the trees, the land, the water, my fellow men, women, and children, and myself - the more health I am going to experience and the more of my real self I am going to be." - O. Carl Simonton