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Love

 

The following quotes were chosen to represent how some teachers or sages have expressed in words a taste or flavor, of their experience or understanding about love. 

 

Love defies any single definition as it can be viewed from various perspectives and dimensions, and volumes have been written that explore the topic in great detail. My intent is to offer a sufficient variety of quotations from respected sources so that you might discover some words with which you personally resonate.

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Quotes

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How Did the rose 

Ever open its heart 

And give to this world 

All its Beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light Against its Being, 

Otherwise, 

We all remain Too Frightened 

~ Hafiz 

 

When all the false self-identifications are thrown away, 

what remains is all-embracing love. 

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj 

 

Only if one knows the truth of love, which is the real nature of Self, will the strong entangled knot of life be untied. 

Only if one attains the height of love will liberation be attained. 

Such is the heart of all religions. 

The experience of Self is only love, which is seeing only love, hearing only love, feeling only love, tasting only love and smelling only love, which is bliss. 

~ Ramana Maharshi

 

All love is God’s infinite love shining in each of our minds.

~ Rupert Spira

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The human being is nothing but the manifestation of the heart of God. So if there were no love we would not exist. Love is that basic. The heart is that basic. All that you see is a manifestation of love. When you actually, finally, let yourself see it, you see that you are a particularization of loving energy. Your atoms are made out of love. Your body is made out of love. Your mind is made out of love. Your surroundings are made out of love. Everything is made out of love. If there were no love, you would see nothing. Beyond love there is just God. Out of that love that manifests from the God state, or from the supreme reality, emerge all of the particularizations. We are the final fruit of that particularization, and because we are the final fruit, we have the microcosmic heart that reflects the universal heart. 

~ A.H. Almaas 

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Phenomenal human love is a teaspoon measure of the infinite love that is within you—love is your essence. Let yourself want more than the pleasure-pain cycle of phenomenal experience. Let yourself want more, and let yourself have more. How? By resting in what you really are and surrendering, falling into that which is prior to all of this.
~ Jac O'Keeffe

 

 . . . fear, anger, hatred and violence are expressions of the loss, or the anticipated loss, of something which is loved. Or, of never having to begin with something which is loved. If there is no love of anything, there is no sense of loss or deprivation and therefore a negative emotion of any kind attached to the absence of anything. . . . All expressions of anger and fear, hatred and violence are distorted wailings of love. 

~ Neale Donald Walsch 

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Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It's not 'I love you' for this or that reason, not 'I love you if you love me.' It's love for no reason, love without an object.

~ Ram Dass

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Love is the motivation behind every yearning. In all of life, Love is seeking to discover itself. We come into this world, and we experience a profound forgetfulness; we are asleep. Everything that happens from then on is the process of waking up to the fact that Love brought us here, that we are loved by a Beneficent Unseen Reality, and that the core of our being is Love. The whole purpose and meaning of creation is to discover the secret of Love.

~ Kabir Helminski

 

I am he that aches with love; Does the earth gravitate? does not all matter, aching, attract all matter? So the body of me to all I meet or know. 

~ Walt Whitman 

 

The sense of duality, which is a barrier to true love, must prevail so long as the apperception of Truth has not occurred. Once individuality is surrendered, there is only total Love. 

~ Ramesh Balsekar 

 

The more evolved you become, the more compassionate you become, the more you show loving kindness to everything, to the mineral kingdom, to the vegetable kingdom, to the animal kingdom, and to the human kingdom. You show total compassion, loving kindness. You become an embodiment of love simply because everything is you. 

~ Robert Adams 

 

When you love a person all fear disappears. And when you are afraid all love disappears. 

~ Osho 

 

The love that you search for everywhere is already present within you. It may be evoked by any number of people or events. But finally, you must realize you are this love. The source of all love is within you. 

~ Gangaji 

 

Even after all this time The sun never says to the earth, "You owe me." Look what happens with a love like that, It lights the Whole sky. 

~ Hafiz 

 

The more we rest in the silence, the more we call forth love. 

~ Pamela Wilson 

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Love cannot be thought about, love cannot be cultivated, love cannot be practiced. The practice of love, the practice of brotherhood, is still within the field of the mind, therefore it is not love. When all this has stopped, then love comes into being, then you will know what it is to love. Then love is not quantitative but qualitative. You do not say, "I love the whole world" but when you know how to love one, you know how to love the whole. Because we do not know how to love one, our love of humanity is fictitious. When you love, there is neither one nor many: there is only love. It is only when there is love that all our problems can be solved and then we shall know its bliss and its happiness.​

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

 

Dare to let Life take you. Lose yourself. Then you'll truly know what Love is. ~ Unmani Love is the ability to see every circumstance and every being as perfect just as they are...It is the total acceptance of all things. 

~ Anam Thubten 

 

ONLY THIS LOVE 

Song by Kirtana from her album A Deeper Surrender 

 

I'm counting my blessings as I lie here in bed 

recalling your face and the words that you said, 

the look in your eyes when I saw you last week, 

that long ago touch of your hand on my cheek 

I'm being consumed by a love I can't speak... 

But if I could, I would try to explain 

how it's worth it to suffer immeasurable pain 

and be born into form on this physical plane 

again and again and again and again 

for the chance to be near you, just once 

and proclaim this love, only this love, only this love 

For this is the nectar my living is worth 

This is my purpose, my reason for birth; 

it was not for some future my mind could conceive 

and not for the deeds my will could achieve 

It was only for love, only this love 

Just like these song notes that rise and decay, 

everyone here will soon pass away, 

even this room and this planet some day 

We can only assume that God planned it that way 

so we wouldn't get lost, but the price we must pay f

or playing this game, is that nothing remains -- only this love, only this love 

I have no idea what the future will bring 

or how many songs I have in me to sing, 

how many chances I'll have to express 

the depth of this love and the ways I've been blessed, 

or how many times I'll be put to the test for love, this love 

But despite all my faults, I hope you can see 

past the tales told by others and the ones told by me 

to the heart of my heart where a river runs free 

untouched by the mind's sense of how things should be 

And you can know me, as I can know you 

and trust in this love we know to be true 

and only this love, only this love, 

only this love, only this love 

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When you plant a seed of love, it is you that blossoms.

~ Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati

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People think that this search--what we do, is craziness. I know family and friends (myself included) have at times, tried to sway me away from this subject.

But, there is no greater pursuit than that of unconditional LOVE.

The human experience in film, art and books etc., revolves around the idea of finding love but they're fixated on the idea that love is containable in a 'thing' and therefore, miss the point.

Spiritual people love to beat themselves up with the idea of ego and what they are doing wrong, but there is no higher search, this..

Just one moment of remembering the unconditioned love that you are, is better than an entire lifetime of only finding love in people and things!

What a noble, beautiful search, to find never ending love in a world that is always moving and changing and most definitively never containable...

~ Lisa Cairns

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In dream you love some and not others. On waking up you find you are love itself, embracing all....When you are love itself, you are beyond time and numbers. In loving one you love all, in loving all, you love each. One and all are not exclusive. 

~ Nisargadatta

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This absolute intimacy of pure experiencing is what we call love. 

It is the absence of distance, separation or otherness. 

There is no room for two there. 

Love is the experience of pure non-duality. 

~ Rupert Spira

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What you will see is love coming out of the trees, love coming out of the sky, love coming out of the light. You will perceive love from everything around you. This is the state of bliss.

~ Don Miguel Ruiz

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The human heart is the start of our journey back to Divine Love. Through it, we can experience many forms of love: pink love (luscious, innocent, soft), merging love (which reveals the boundlessness of the universe in a very personal way), passionate love (which gives us the power to move fearlessly toward what we love).

All of these arise from one source. And the more we dive into the various flavors of love, become that love, the closer we come to that source, that Divine Love.

“The freedom of the heart is having the full range, from being deeply in love with your bowl of chocolate ice cream all the way to feeling a bottomless, infinite pool of love that’s the source of every experience of love and other emotions. With any luck, what might change for anyone who comes into greater contact or realization of Divine Love is…everything! You as you know yourself are no longer there. The universe and our relationships and your life are filled with, imbued with, dripping with the nature of love without the usual person you take as yourself. What’s there instead is an ease, an individual who is purified of certain conditions of their history, of certain patterns that have fixated because of various ways we have developed psychologically or culturally."

~ Zarina Maiwandi

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Love has nothing to do with another person. Love is your individual and collective soul. Love is God. Love is truth. Love is beauty. Love is Self. To know yourself, to surrender to the truth of yourself, is to surrender to love.

~ Gangaji 

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I love you neither with my heart, nor with my mind. My heart might stop, my mind can forget. I love you with my soul because my soul never stops or forgets.  

~ Rumi

 

To love is to recognize the essential Unity. To recognize Unity is to know the truth of things. It does no good to exhort someone or yourself to "love more." Love is always a gift. Love comes unexpectedly. Love is a mystery. If we are seekers, we may try to unravel this mystery. Penetrate it. Bend it to our understanding. But ultimately love reveals itself to be grace, an undeserved kiss from the Universe. In a sense it is a passage through the illusion of independence. It is a moment in which the truth of things is revealed and in that moment we feel the expansion of ourselves such that we are no longer independent of that which we love, we are Unified, we are whole, we are at peace.

~ Wayne Liquorman

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Love starts with us giving ourselves a break. It’s saying ”Okay, okay, I’m not perfect. Okay. I’m not valedictorian, number one athlete, movie star, money-maker. I'm kind of sick, I’m kind of tired, I’m kind of dorky, I lie sometimes, I'm cruel sometimes. I like Barry Manilow, so shoot me.” 

~ Jeannie Zandi

 

Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form.

~ Eckhart Tolle

 

Love is the primary way the bliss of being expresses itself. Love is the perfume of union, of the unity of reality, when seen beyond external divisions and separateness. However, because we ordinarily know ourselves as separate beings, love is needed to bring us together and unify reality in our perception. In that process we begin to see how love is the force that permeates the natural state of the world. Love is what causes walls and boundaries to disappear, and love is what fills the space that is left. Love is what draws us toward another and allows us to see the other without veils.

~ A..H. Almaas

 

Maybe everything we've ever done has been for love. 

~ Byron Katie

 

Learning how to love is the goal and the purpose of spiritual life not learning how to develop psychic powers, not learning how to bow, chant, do yoga, or even meditate, but learning to love. Love is the truth. Love is the light.

~ Lama Surya Das

 

Come on, tell the truth, in the end it is all about being in love with yourself. Even loving others, doing for others, is all about loving yourself. We are in love with ourselves, every little thing we love. Even the heart breaking, soul shattering, I can’t stand this tough life stuff, we are in love with. Let’s face it we are in love with ourselves, and this self includes the whole.

~ Susanne Marie

 

We can be aware of our Source of Being. The illusions of the mind may hold our love for a time, but to love Love itself, we must turn within. The soul's longing for its true Home is the guide to finding this Love. Follow the lover of the Beloved back upstream to your Source. 

~ St. John of the Cross 

 

Love is the cure, for your pain will keep giving birth to more pain until your eyes constantly exhale love as effortlessly as your body yields its scent. 

~ Rumi 

 

Trying to fall in love is like trying to make your heart beat backwards. It can't be done. I am already what you are. And so we don't fall in love; we simply notice that we are in love already, and always have been. We don't fall in love; it is the 'we', the 'me' and the 'you', the 'inbetween', that falls away in love, revealing the intimacy of our own absence. We are all so deeply in love that we don't realise it. 

~ Jeff Foster 

 

Love, like a sleeping beauty, lies in the heart. 

And awareness is the prince that goes inside and kisses the sleeping beauty. 

We take our awareness into the heart to find love, and just one kiss, awareness and love, awakens Truth.

In this love affair it's nice to bring the beloved a little gift - tiny. 

We sacrifice what is held dearest: not a cow, not a camel, not a goal, but just a little bit of individuality we give her as a gift. 

We hand her the castle walls and defenses as our gift - a small trade.

~ Pamela Wilson

 

The love that you search for everywhere is already present within you. It may be evoked by any number of people or events. But finally, you must realize you are this love. The source of all love is within you.

~ Gangaji

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