love

To practice loving requires practicing its foundations: discipline, concentration, and patience.

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

To love somebody is not just a strong feeling- it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision?

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

I want to be able to say that I love who you are, truly love who you are, which does not mean that I don’t want you to change or improve, but means that I actually can meet you, hold you, take you fully in this moment. My acceptance is not conditional on how you’ll modify yourself in the future. You are flawed and I am flawed. Terence: I am human, and therefore nothing human is alien to me.

bookbear express

Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love.

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

No gaze is passive: whether it renders the world for you, causes a physiological reaction, or collapses some elementary wave function.

You Are The Universe, Deepak Chopra

(3.3) If you look at things in isolation there's nothing beautiful about them, and yet by supplementing nature they enrich and bring us in. It all gives pleasure. Things call out to us constantly- things unnoticed by others.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

Mary Oliver

Love is as important as work, as crucial to our survival as a nation as the drive to succeed.

bell hooks, All About Love