Insight Exhibit: Love

This section cites quotations that convey insights relating to love, friendship, cooperation, and related human emotions and activities.

A thousand words won't leave so deep an impression as one deed.
- anonymous

Snowflakes are one of nature's most fragile things, but just look at what they can do when they stick together.
- anonymous

To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To reach out for another is to risk involvement.
To expose feelings is to risk exposing our true self.
To place your ideas, your dreams, before the crowd is to risk loss.
To love is to risk not being loved in return.
To live is to risk dying.
To hope is to risk despair.
To try at all is to risk failure.
But to risk we must,
Because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.
The man, the woman, who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing.
- anonymous

He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.
- anonymous

Some people grin and bear it. Others smile and change it.
- anonymous

A true gentleman is one who knows how to play the bag-pipe -- but doesn't.
- anonymous

Boaster: A person with whom it is no sooner done than said.
- anonymous

We wouldn't worry so much about what other people thought of us if we knew how seldom they did.
- anonymous

There's no point in burying a hatchet if you're going to put up a marker on the site.
- anonymous

Those who deserve love the least, need it the most.
- anonymous

When it comes to helping others, some people stop at nothing.
- anonymous

When we do ill, the devil tempts us; when we do nothing, we tempt him.
- anonymous

To tell the truth is good. To live the truth is better.
- anonymous

We like someone because; we love someone although.
- anonymous

Love is not a gazing at each other, but a looking outward together in the same direction.
- anonymous

If you don't understand me in my silence, you won't understand me in my words.
- anonymous

People respond to people who respond.
- anonymous

Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope.
- anonymous

If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it's yours. If it doesn't, it never was.
- anonymous

You can reach me if you but considered what I am, and you can reach me still whenever you wish if you are content to find me as I am and not as you wish me to be.
- Bernard of Clairvaux (q.i. Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Genesee Diary, p.87)

The bird a nest, The spider a web, Man friendship.
- William Blake

Friendships multiply joys and divide griefs.
- H.G. Bohn

The wealth of a nation is derived from the love generated by the people of that nation. Nations are healed because people are healed.
- Ken Carey (Vision)

The work of an unknown good man is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground greener.
- Thomas Carlyle

The work will wait while you show the child the rainbow, but the rainbow won't wait while you do the work.
- P. Clafford

There is nothing so strong as gentleness; nothing so gentle as real strength.
- Francis DeSales

That which we call sin in others is experiment for us.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

True friendship comes when silence between two people is comfortable.
- Dave T. Gentry

Life is divided into two halves, one frozen, the other aflame; the burning half is love.
- Kahlil Gibran (Prophecies on Love)

The respect of those you respect is worth more than the applause of the multitude.
- Arnold Glasow

Love does not dominate, it cultivates.
- Goethe

The Lover desires the perfection of the Beloved -- which requires, among other things, the liberation of the Beloved from the Lover.
- Dag Hammarskjšld (Markings, p.99)

He who cannot forgive others destroys the bridge over which he himself must pass.
- George Herbert

I was a better man with you, as a woman, than I ever was with a woman, as a man.
- Dustin Hoffman (Tootsie)

Humility is a strange thing, the moment we think we've got it, we've lost it.
- E.D. Hulse

Reason is mature when circumspect;* if love
is circumspect it isn't yet mature.
- Iqbal (Urdu poet) in Poetry of Asia, p.155
*circumspect in this context means watching out for the consequences of one's action

If people who do not understand each other at least understand that they do not understand each other, then they understand each other better than when, not understanding each other, they do not understand that they do not understand each other.
- Gustav Ischheiser (q.i. Wayne W. Dyer, Your Erroneous Zones, p.80)

He who is near to the fire is near to me.
- Jesus (Gospel of Thomas)

Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from imitation of those we cannot resemble.
- Dr. Johnson

Forgive your enemies -- if you can't get back at them any other way.
- Franklin P. Jones

... the teacher is the midwife of the pupil's thoughts ...
- Immanuel Kant (Metaphysics of Morals, p.478)

I do not lecture to the genius, because he will cut his own path without my help; nor do I speak to the fool, because he is not worth it; I concentrate rather on the student who stands in the middle and desires to prepare himself for his future profession.
- Immanuel Kant (q.i. VorlŠnder, Kants Leben, p.123)

Symptoms of disease are nothing but a disguised manifestation of the power of love; and all disease is only love transformed.
- Keats (The Magic Mountain, q.i. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, p.21)

It is labor that makes love real and love that makes labor meaningful. Alienation, more than aught else, is the dissociation of love and labor, leaving love an empty sentimentality and labor a drudgery.
- Erazim Kohak (The Embers and the Stars, p.191)

If you wish to make a man your enemy, tell him simply, "You are wrong." This method works every time.
- Henry Link

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
- Longfellow

God's love does not love that which is worthy of being loved but it creates that which is worthy of being loved.
- Martin Luther

In a relationship with problems, no party is innocent. We're constantly searching for innocence, and yet the most innocent place in the world is the asylum. The perfection of innocence is, indeed, madness.
- Arthur Miller

The best way to keep your friends is not to give them away.
- Mizner

There is nothing harder than the softness of indifference.
- Juan Montalvo

Remember when atmospheric contaminants were romantically called stardust?
- Lane Olinghouse

It is estimated that Jesus Christ spent two-thirds of His active ministry with 12 men. What did He do? He did not give them a formal education. Nor did He provide them with a systematized course. He merely poured the contents of the cup of His life into 12 men's empty cups.... So, you'd like to change the world, would you? Find someone with an empty cup!
- P.R.S.

What was "a sin" in grandma's day is now referred to "as in".
- P. Pratt (alt.)

We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears.
- F. Rochefoucauld

At some point -- and I believe the time is at hand -- all of us who have been touched by the adventure of self-discovery must face our convivial responsibilities directly and steadily, perhaps even before our personal quest is complete. We must come to see that what we experience in ourselves as the emerging need of the person is the Earth's urgent cry for rescue.
- Theodore Roszak (Person/Planet)

When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.
- John Ruskin

Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
- Tom Soule

To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.
- Sun Tzu, The Art of War 3.3

[In heaven,] beings are not for or against, but...everybody and everything is understood, looked upon with pity and compassion and loved with fire.
- Richard Wurmbrand (Tortured For Christ, p.55)

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This page was last updated on 20 November 1997.

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