Quotes on love

Ultimate reality is incommensurate with our own illusoriness and imperfection; therefore it cannot be understood by means of intellectual operations; for intellectual operations depend on language and our vocabulary and syntax were evolved for the purpose of dealing precisely with that imperfection and illusoriness. Ultimate reality cannot be understood except intuitively, through an act of the will and the affections. ‘Plus diligatur quam intelligatur’ was a common place of scholastic philosophy. ‘Love can go further than understanding’; for love enters where science remains out of doors. We love God in his essence but in his essence we do not see him.

For thus it was made out to me; I loved thee while thou wast committing this sin, I loved thee before, I love thee still, and I will love thee for ever.

He showed me a little thing the size of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and thought: what may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marvelled how it could last, for it seemed so little that it might suddenly have fallen to nought. And I was answered in my understanding; it lasteth and ever so small because God loveth it. And so the world hath its existence by the love of God.

What we most truly are in the depth of our soul refuses to surrender to force – force from within no more than force from without. That is what St. Augustine meant when he said that Christ’s command to love God is not obeyed if it is obeyed as a command. That is what St. Paul meant when he said, "Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor and though I give my body to be burned and have not charity, it will profit me nothing.

Agape (love or charity) is energetic and beneficent good will which stops at nothing to secure the good of the beloved object. It is not principally an emotion or an affection; it is primarily an active determination of the will. That is why it can be commanded as feeling cannot.

Love found me in the wilderness, at cost
Of painful quests, when I myself had lost.
Love on its shoulders joyfully did lay
Me, weary with the greatness of my way
Love lit the lamp and swept the house all round,
Till the lost money in the end was found.
‘Twas love, whose ever quick and watchful eye
The wanderer’s first step homeward did espy
From its own wardrobe love gave word to bring
What things I needed shoes and robe and ring

It is by love only that one keeps hold on reality.

To turn all we possess into the channels of universal love becomes the business of our lives.

Agape is that form of love in which God loves us and in which we are to love our neighbour – especially if we do not like him.

Let us believe, hope, love, someday there shall be victory.
St Augustine page 89

Now we have agreed that love is in love with what he lacks and does not possess.

Love: the power of union – Dame Julian would say: oneing – and bearing fruit. Sex is the symbol which stands for it, not the thing itself.

Love Thy Neighbour “I must make one confession,” Ivan began. “I could never understand how one could love one’s neighbours. It’s just one’s neighbours, to my mind, that one can’t love, though one might love those at a distance…”

Whoever loved that will not love for ever?

Love is goodwill on fire.

The ways are two: love and want of love. That is all.

To turn all we possess into the channels of universal love becomes the business of our lives.

One cannot even be just to one’s neighbour, unless one loves him.

The ’new morality’ is of course none other than the old morality, just as the new commandment is the old, yet ever fresh, commandment of love. It is what St. Augustine dared to say with his ‘dilige et quod vis fiac’, which as Fletcher rightly insists, should be translated not ‘love and do what you please’ but ‘love and then what you will, do.’

Love means loyalty rather than instinctive emotions. ‘Treat your enemies as men’ is the meaning, for any man has the right to kind treatment and sympathetic prayer.

Perfect love means to love the one through whom one became unhappy. But no man has the right to demand to be thus loved.

Love without power is sentimental and anaemic: power without love is reckless and abusive.

'Be warned by me', says Robert Browning, 'seek only love and leave the rest.