SO GOOD QUOTES

Category: LOVE

  • We make a lot of contradicting statements that do not logically make sense. “I love everybody, but I don’t want to talk to this person.”

    —Fr. Mini Dimitri

  • You hurt because you care. Therefore, the best response to pain is to dive deeper into your caring. Which is exactly the opposite of what most of us want to do. We want to avoid pain: to ward off the bitter by not caring quite so much about the sweet.

    —Susan Cain, Bittersweet

  • As for the one who is self-centred, he never knows love as it should be. And if he does love, his love would not be capable of enduring as it should be. Bear the faults of others as God bears your faults. Bear, but not in distress and bitterness of heart but in love, feeling that everyone has his own weaknesses. Maybe he also has his own excuses that you do not know.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Words of Spiritual Benefit Vol. IV

  • Is your love for friends and favoured ones: also firm? Or could any specific event make your heart change towards a love that you had for many years? That is what sometimes happens in a family which makes it collapse and separate after many years. It fails to hold fast against the water, even if it is not many waters.

    Does your love change because of a word that did not please your ears? Or a behaviour that annoyed you? Or the effect of others on you? Or for external circumstances, or financial reasons? Then the words of the Bible echo in your ears, “nevertheless, I have this against you, that you have left your first love.” (Rev. 2:4).

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Words of Spiritual Benefit Vol. IV

  • If you are faithful in loving your relative, God will set you over loving the enemy. He will give you the grace which enables you to love your enemy.

    —Pope Shenouda III, Words of Spiritual Benefit Vol. 1

  • Becoming a parent has lifted a corner of my blindfold and let me glimpse what God’s love looks like. My son, Jaden, is incapable of doing anything—anything at all—that could make me stop loving him. There is nothing he could say or do, or forget to say or not do, that would ever diminish the love I have for him in my heart. He can’t out-sin my love, just as I cannot out-sin God’s love.

    —Jena Morrow, Hollow: An Unpolished Tale

  • And beware you do not blindly insist that things must work out according to what you consider to be right and good. God sometimes does permit such blind insistence to be followed by the fulfilment of our ardent desires. This always leads to misery and disaster (intended to open our eyes on our folly), and happens particularly often when our desires are founded on wild passions.

    Letters of Elder Macarius of Optina

  • Do not misunderstand me: I am not denigrating your rule of prayer, or your reading of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. I want to leave you quite free to continue these occupations or to modify them according to your own light. But do try to remember that love of the neighbor is the first work you must strive for. And you do not even have to leave your house to find that neighbor: your husband is that neighbor; your mother is that neighbor; and so are your children.

    Letters of Elder Macarius of Optina

  • A home is a Christian one, when all the members of the household bear each other’s burdens, and when each one condemns only himself.

    Letters of Elder Macarius of Optina

  • After a careful study of your disposition, which life has encouraged you to undertake, you have at last come to see that you have never loved; nor do you know or understand anything about love.

    Letters of Elder Macarius of Optina