Category: LOVE

  • Remember the great love and great achievements involve great risks. The measure of love is when you love without measure. In life, there are very rare chances that you meet the person you love and who loves you in return. So once you have it, don’t ever let go—the chance might never come your way again. It’s better to lose your pride to the one you love than to lose the one you love because of pride. We spend so much time looking for the right person to love or finding fault with those who we already love, when instead, we should be perfecting the love we give. When you truly care for someone, you don’t look for faults, you don’t look for answers, you don’t look for mistakes. Instead, you fight the mistakes, you accept the faults, and you overlook excuses. Never abandon an old friend. You will never find one who can take his or her place. Friendship is like fine wine—it gets better as it grows older.

    —Fr. Mauritius

  • He who has forgiven little, loves little. And he who has forgiven much, loves much. For love is born of forgiveness, and forgiveness is the remission of sins. Therefore, the more we forgive, the more we love; and the more we love, the more we are forgiven.

    —St John Climacus

  • What if God was like, “I forgive you, but I want nothing to do with you?” Is that how it works with us?

    —Fr. Elijah Estafanous

  • 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. Mina 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