“To desire you is to desire vulnerability to alterity.”
— Merold Westphal, “Prayer as the Posture of the Decentered Self,” The Phenomenology of Prayer (edited by Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba)
“The near enemy of love is attachment. Attachment masquerades as love. It says, ‘I will love this person because I need them.’ Or, ‘I’ll love you if you’ll love me back. I’ll love you, but only if you will be the way I want.’ This isn’t love at all—it is attachment—and attachment is rigid, it is very different from love. When there is attachment there is clinging and fear. Love allows, honors, and appreciates; attachment grasps, demands, needs, and aims to possess. Attachment is conditional, offers love only to certain people in certain ways; it is exclusive. Love, in the sense of metta, used by the Buddha, is a universal, nondiscriminating feeling of caring and connectedness. We may even love those whom we may not approve of or like. We may not condone their behavior, but we cultivate forgiveness. Love is a powerful force that transforms any situation.”
— Jack Kornfield, Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are (via negcjm)
(via anotherword)
“I don’t trust people who don’t love themselves and yet tell me, ‘I love you.’ There is an African saying: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.”
— Maya Angelou, “The Distinguished Annie Clark Tanner Lecture,” given at Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, May 8, 1999 (via larmoyante)
(via anotherword)
“Love is giving someone the power to destroy you, but trusting them not to.”
— Unknown
if anyone knows where this is from, please do lemme know! it’d be much appreciated. (:
(via hours)
“[T]he love of God which lives in man loves sinners, evil persons, fools, and weaklings in order to make them righteous, good, wise, and strong. Rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows forth and bestows good. Therefore sinners are ‘attractive’ because they are loved; they are not loved because they are ‘attractive’… . Thus Christ says: ‘For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners’ (Matt. 9:13). This is the love of the cross, born of the cross, which turns in the direction where it does not find good which it may enjoy, but where it may confer good upon the bad and needy person. ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’ (Acts 20:35), says the Apostle.”
— Martin Luther, The Heidelberg Disputation
“I want to love people so much that I work myself to the bone for their qualitative betterment. I should be interested in raising people up, not just their standards. The first being done, the second can surely come. I want to serve all people by enriching them, by taking them higher. And I want to take what they already have, honoring it because they made it. I want to take what they are—my loved neighbors—and give them the best of what I know and have. I also want them to know that my artistic journey is nowhere near complete and that I too must be taken higher by those above me who continue to teach me.”
— Harold M. Best, Unceasing Worship: Biblical Perspectives on Worship and the Arts (via schizophreniatic)
(via bookofwriting)
“We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.”
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up (via larmoyante)
(via hours)
“The problem of lust is that it’s selfish; when we lust we appropriate for ourselves what isn’t ours to take and, all too often, lose sight of the humanity of the person for whom we’re lusting.”
— Hugo Schwyzer, Beauty vs. Sexuality, RELEVANT Magazine
“I want to love her the way that she enjoys being loved. Not just the way that I know how to love her, but also the way that she wants to be loved, and both are really important.”
— Laura Fitch, The Devotion Project: Listen from the Heart (dir. Antony Osso)
“Love wounds. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet. No love that leaves the lover unmarked.”
— Jeanette Winterson, Art & Lies
“Love wounds. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet. Love’s exquisite happiness is also love’s exquisite pain. I do not seek pain but there is pain. I do not seek suffering but there is suffering. It is better not to flinch, not to try and avoid those things in love’s direction. It is not easy, this love, but only the impossible is worth the effort.”
— Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook
“Loving—that means assuming nothing, bringing nothing along from anywhere else, forgetting everything, and being ready to receive from one person what you had before and everything else besides.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, “A Tale of Death with a Strange Postscript,” Stories of God (translated by Michael H. Kohn)
“In love we escape from our self into one other.”
— C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
“Can you only love what you know? […] Or is love what you don’t know?”
— Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods
“In the dark and in the water I weigh nothing at all. I have no vanity but I would enjoy the consolation of a lover’s face. After my only excursion into love I resolved never to make a fool of myself again. I was offered a job in a whore-house but I turned it down on account of my frailty of heart. Surely such to-ing and fro-ing as must go on night and day weakens the heart and inclines it to love? Not directly, you understand, but indirectly, for lust without romantic matter must be wearisome after a time. I asked a girl at the Spitalfields house about it and she told me that she hates her lovers-by-the-hour but still longs for someone to come along in a coach and feed her on mince-pies.
Where do they come from, these insubstantial dreams?”
— Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (via marioalbertozambrano)
