Category: LOVE

  • Love is the Kingdom, whereof the Lord mystically promised His disciples to eat in His Kingdom. For when we hear Him say, ‘Ye shall eat and drink at the table of My Kingdom’ what do we suppose we shall eat, if not love? Love is sufficient to nourish a man instead of food and drink. This is the wine ‘which maketh glad the heart of man’. Blessed is he who partakes of this wine! Licentious men have drunk this wine and felt
    shame; sinners have drunk it and have forgotten the pathways of stumbling; drunkards have drunk this wine and become fasters; the rich have drunk it and desired poverty; the poor have drunk it and been enriched with hope; the sick have drunk it and become strong; the unlearned have taken it and been made wise.

    —St. Isaac the Syrian

  • Living in the world, surrounded by your family, you cannot possibly give away all your possessions. So you must aim at finding the golden mean, and strive to keep to it: never turn your back on the world, but see to it that the world does not engross you.

    Letters of Elder Macarius of Optina

  • And a Ferrari owner is not shallow and greedy, but animated by a poignant need for love.

    Bittersweet
    Susan Cain

  • “For the more you abound in wealth, the more you lack in love.”

    —St. Basil the Great, On Social Justice

  • People carry their loved ones with them. They are forever present, and life is full of easily grasped opportunities to show them one’s affection.

    —Tove Jansson, The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories

  • in this case death does not bring separation, but union with Him Who is longed for; for when (a soul) departs , then it is with Christ, as the Apostle says.

    On Virginity, Chap. 23
    St. Gregory of Nyssa

  • The love you lost, or the love you wished for and never had: That love exists eternally. It shifts its shape, but it’s always there.

    Bittersweet
    Susan Cain

  • Of them all, it was the true love. Of them all, it was the best. That other, that sumptuous love which made one drunk, which one longed for, envied, believed in, that was not life. It was what life was seeking; it was a suspension of life. But to be close to a child, for whom one spent everything, whose life was protected and nourished by one’s own, to have that child beside one, at peace, was the real, the deepest, the only joy.

    Light Years
    James Salter

  • You think when you have love that love is easy to find, that everyone has it. It’s not true. It’s very hard to find.”

    Light Years
    James Salter

  • Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.

    What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.

    —James Baldwin