SO GOOD QUOTES

Category: LOVE

  • “It seems we don’t know how to love the ones we love until they disappear from our lives.”

    —Joshua Fields Millburn, Everything That Remains: A Memoir by The Minimalists

  • I fell silent, with a sense of satiety, of futility. I might, I reflected, go on questioning my mother for hours and still not come to a conclusion about anything: her life, and she herself, had by now attained a degree of utter meaninglessness which amounted, in the long run, to a sort of mystery at the same time both dull and impenetrable.

    Boredom
    Alberto Moravia

  • Consider watching through a window as a family enjoys a home-cooked meal. You might imagine how it feels to be part of this group—their warmth and happiness, their sense of belonging as they pass dishes back and forth. Now imagine being part of this family. Maybe you do feel warmth and happiness, but those feelings are much more complex, less tidy. What came before the dinner? What comes after? Are you actually present, or thinking about something else? Your family is not a snapshot or a concept; it’s messy, in flux, evolving. It has depth and continuity. No matter how lovely the dinner is in reality, it can never really live up to what the observer imagines. Because what they imagine is actually just a symbol—an idea they’ve adapted from TV, movies, and marketing their entire lives about what it means to be part of a happy family.

    #187: Drowning in envy
    Haley Nahman

  • Excessive sorrow for our loved ones who have left this world is not a Christian act, but an act of godlessness. We prepare ourselves in this life for eternal life. We must be thankful for everything and thank God for taking the souls of our departed loved ones to Himself.

    —Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica

  • ”Only struggle a little more. Carry your cross without complaining. Don’t think you are anything special. Don’t justify your sins and weaknesses, but see yourself as you really are. And, especially, love one another.”

    —Fr. Seraphim Rose

  • There is an Arabic saying that says that if someone loves you, he will endure and be patient with you, but your enemy lies in wait for you to make a mistake. This is very true. If I love someone, I will let it go; I will endure. But if I do not love, I will be lying in wait to catch the person in a word he might say. Lack of endurance is lack of love.

    —H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Endure Injustice

  • There are virtues of the body and virtues of the soul. Those of the body include fasting, vigils, sleeping on the ground, ministering to people’s needs, working with one’s hands so as not to be a burden or in order to give to others (cf. 1 Thess. 2:9, Ephes. 4:28). Those of the soul include love, long-suffering, gentleness, self-control, and prayer (cf. Gal, 5:22). If as a result of some constraint or bodily condition, such as illness or the like, we find we cannot practice the bodily virtues mentioned above, we are forgiven by the Lord because He knows the reasons. But if we fail to practice the virtues of the soul, we shall not have a single excuse, for it is always within our power to practice them.

    —St Maximos the Confessor, Four Hundred Texts on Love

  • When I joined L’Arche Daybreak, where people with disabilities are at the center of the community, no one cared that I write books or give lectures to university audiences and church groups around the world. My achievements did not impress them. What they cared deeply about was how consistently I showed up for them and showed them how much I loved them.

    —Henri Nouwen, Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life

  • Still, when we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not-curing, not-healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

    —Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life

  • There is no aspect of any suffering whatever that is foreign to Me, that is outside Me. I am afflicted in all the afflictions of men, espousing them to the maximum, without their being able to erode My nature either by corrupting it or by diminishing it. Each human affliction releases in Me a new impulse of Love which wants to sweep into its vortex everything negative. Thou, mother who hast lost thy child,
    woman who hast lost thy husband, young girl who hast lost thy sweetheart, thou who art tortured by cancer, thou who art prisoner in a concentration camp, another the prisoner of alcohol, or of drugs, or of an egoistic sexuality, I am bowed over your misery, ah! If you but knew that I did not will such things, that they result from the work of the enemy, and that, invisibly, I am fighting for you! The outcome I prepare for you is one of light. Now is the hour and the power of darkness; and the time of their undoing must still remain hidden. But My Love will overcome their resistance and will wipe away all the tears. The veil will be lifted. Then you will see, you will understand. You will make your choice.

    —Lev Gillet, In Thy Presence