LOVE QUOTES

LOVE GIVES MEANING TO LIFE
Love and meaning of life

LOVE IS...

There is only one happiness in life: to love and be loved.
George Sand, 1804-1876, French writer, Letter to Lina Calamatta

Only the soul that loves is happy.
J. W. Goethe, 1749-1831, German writer, Egmont

Even if I speak all the languages of men and of angels, if I don't have love, life became sounding brass, and a clanging cymbal.
Bible, Corinthians  

We human beings are animals dependant on love.
Humberto Maturama, in E. Morin Method V

The poetry of life, with the love it contains and that contains it, is the only response to death.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Method V

Love makes us tolerate destiny, and makes us love life.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Method V

Love is the great poetry in the prosaic modern world.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Method V

The two wings of our souls, immune to any gust of wind, are true love and faith.
Attributed to Stanislas-Xavier Touchet, 1848-1926, French religious

Life is sown with miracles that only people who love can wait for.
Marcel Proust, 1871-1922, French writer, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

                                      
You might say that love is friendship gone mad.
Seneca, Roman philosopher and politician, Letters to Lucilius

Comments
Forms of love - love and happiness



BROTHERLY LOVE
Love and meaning of life


In Tibet we say that many illnesses can be cured by the one medicine of love and compassion.
Dalai Lama, Tibetan political and spiritual leader, Voices from the Heart 

No material object, however beautiful or valuable, can make us feel loved, because our deeper identity and true character is in the subjective nature of the mind.
Dalai Lama, Tibetan political and spiritual leader, Voices from the Heart 

The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater our own sense of well-being becomes. Cultivating a close, warm-hearted feeling for others automatically puts the mind at ease.
Dalai Lama, Tibetan political and spiritual leader, Voices from the Heart 

The need for love lies at the very foundation of human existence. It results from the profound interdependence we all share with one another.
Dalai Lama, Tibetan political and spiritual leader, Voices from the Heart 

I see God in every human being. When I wash the leper's wounds, I feel I am nursing the Lord himself. 
Mother Teresa, 1910-1997, Roman Catholic missionary, Guardian 6/9/97

Comments
Forms of love - love and happiness


See also:
Life and friendship
Happiness
Philosophies of Life
Life Best Years

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LOVE AND MEANING OF LIFE

Above:
Fragment of Indian painting: Shiva and fammily


Commentary
Forms of love

We need to love. Love is meaning to our lives. It’s virtually impossible to tolerate life without love. Love is intrinsic to men; love is, within a certain scientific view, the inheritor of the remote impulse of bacterium to unite and to fuse with each other.

Love has the power of transmuting human beings, and the power to sink them (in its absence). Love is, inclusively, at the heart of some of our hates, and of many human crimes. It was in the name of a certain idea of love (to God) and narrowly interpreted religious truths that Muslim fundamentalists  performed the New York September 11 or the Madrid March 11 slaughters.

Terrorism and hate are perverted forms of love. Frustrated love and all that opposes  love are often the objects of hatred. Love is hidden in most different levels of our existence and of our search for happiness and fullness, and takes different forms, contents and degrees.

There is the love of ideas, of projects and ideals. There is the love of God. «Late I began to love you, my God, my Beauty so ancient and so young, late I began to love you» (Saint Augustine). There is a mother’s love, a father’s love, a son’s love, a family’s love, with all the intensity, the authenticity and profoundness.

There is brotherly love, expressed in solidarity and sympathy for others. «The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater our own sense of well-being becomes» (Dalai Lama).

There is the love for all creatures, for the whole world, for animals, of which Saint Francis of Assisi is perhaps the biggest exponent: «He wanted to call the silent animals, even the smallest, by the names of brother and sister, recognizing in them the same origin of him» (Saint Boaventura).

But the most renowned love, that which attracts the most comments, is passionate love, the love between man and woman, with all the enchantment, poetry, greatness and exceptionality that it can contain.

It is love that makes us «see the world with other eyes» and levels of «superior beauty» (Santayana). It is to this love that the world of «poetry», as opposed to the «prose world» (Rimbaud), is connected. Love «enchants the mountain hunter lions, the sea animals, man and all the creatures that earth feeds» (Euripides).

It is love that Shakespeare refers to in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when he says that «Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends».

This is the great love chanted and considered by poets and novelists alike,  present in the Bible, in the Song of Solomon («Your two breasts are like two fawns that are twins of a roe, which feed among the lilies». «You are all beautiful, my love. There is no spot in you»), and present in the great medieval sagas, such as that of Lancelot and Queen Guinevere.