Category: LOVE

  • That is the message of Claire’s Knee. Love is a serious business, and sex is a serious business. It’s not always possible to control it with “reason” (the message of My Night at Maud’s) or with a casual, “free love” approach to life (the message of Claire’s Knee). The older, harsher, more dogmatic rules were created to deal with the physical and elemental side of romance and sex. Rohmer is saying that, perhaps, we should think twice before setting them aside.

    …

    But Rohmer isn’t going along. He thinks it’s all a crock — the whole milieu, the whole lifestyle, the whole philosophy. It’s life as a porn film. It’s not going to work.

    —Robert Garrick, Claire’s Knee, Cinema St. Louis

  • “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”

    —Mother Teresa

  • “You don’t just stop loving someone because they don’t love you back.”

    —Roald Dahl, Esio Trot

  • Such persons are so caught up in God’s love that everything else can only receive its meaning and purpose in the context of that love. They ask only one question: “What is pleasing to the Spirit of God?” And as soon as they have heard the sound of the Spirit in the silence and solitude of their hearts, they follow its promptings even if it upsets their friends, disrupts their environment, and confuses their admirers.

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

  • “Do not wish to assure everyone in words of your love for them, but rather ask God to show them your love without words.”

    —St. John Climacus

  • We don’t come into this world separate, or belonging to a select few, but we’re a part of the human race. All of us amazingly the same in spite of our differences.

    This is the real thing. We belong to each other. We always have…

    I count it a loss if I don’t touch a life, offer a smile, a prayer, a pause along the way. So every day I continue to do this one tiny thing. This one tiny, incredible thing.

    —River Jordan, Praying for Strangers

  • Stop pleasing yourself and you will not hate your brother; stop loving yourself and you will love God.”

    —St. Maximos the Confessor

  • “Because I loved myself, I was loved.”

    —Erica Jong, Blood & Honey

  • “Not only do my choices and their consequences effect those around me immediately, but my choices also effect those far away and those not yet born.”

    —Fr. Michael Gillis

    “Your lives in your homes are a responsibility, and have a deep effect in the generations coming after you.”

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III

    “The life of each one of us does not end at death on this earth and birth into heaven. We place a seal on everyone we meet. This responsibility continues after death, and the living are related to the dead for whom they pray. In the dead we no longer belong completely to the world; in us the dead still belong to history. Prayer for the dead is vital; it expresses the totality of our common life.”

    —Metropolitan Anthony Bloom

    Every human being is an incalculable force, bearing within him something of the future. To the end of time, our daily words and actions will bear fruit, either good or bad; nothing that we have once given of ourselves will perish, but our words and works, handed on from one to another, will continue to do good or harm to remote generations. This is why life is a sacred thing, and we ought not to pass through it thoughtlessly, but to appreciate its value and use it so that, when we are gone, the sum total of good in the world may be greater.

    —Servant of God Elisabeth Leseur

  • “Thorns are as much a part of a rose as the flower.”

    — Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation