Category: LOVE

  • “‘Overcome evil with good.’ [Romans 12:21]  For you cannot conquer evil with evil, just as you cannot put out fire by fire, but only by water.”

    —St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ

  • If the “meaning” of life or the “solution” to life’s problems could be summed up in one word, I believe that word would be love. This is a conclusion I have reached through my (hereto) thirty-four years of life; but although I often change my opinion on major topics as I get older, I believe that no matter how long I will yet live, on this point my mind will never change. I cannot see any virtue that comes close to this one in the blessings and fruit it produces, and I have never seen any loss that has produced more hurt and pain than the loss of love.

    What is the Best Part of Life?  The Value of Love and Connecting with Others

  • Happiness and unhappiness depend on how much Love you have. 

    —Monk Simon of Mt. Athos

  • Strive as hard as you can to love every man. If you cannot yet do this, at least do not hate anybody.

    —St Maximos the Confessor

  • This thought of yours is wicked; for it wants to prevent you from correcting your brother. Therefore, do not prevent yourself from speaking; but rather, speak according to God.

    For, indeed, even sick people that are being healed will speak against their doctors; yet, the latter do not care, knowing that the same people will thank them afterward.

    Letters from the Desert: A Selection of Questions and Responses (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press Popular Patristics Series)

  • As a child I was always borrowing other people’s families, being invited for a week or a month in the summer to share a family life.

    Journal of a Solitude
    May Sarton

  • And therefore God, the Creator of all, caring above everything for the restoration of His handiwork, and knowing that the root and cause of offenses lie not in others but in our own selves, has bade us not to separate ourselves from consort with the brethren, nor to avoid those whom we think that we have injured or that they have injured us, but rather to soothe their feelings, knowing that a perfect heart is acquired, not by drawing apart from men, but by the virtue of patience. This virtue, when it is firmly held, will make us to hold to the love of peace even with them that hate peace, and when we possess it not, our lack thereof makes us constantly at enmity with those who may be perfect and higher in virtue than we. For it needs must be that, in the course of human intercourse, occasions of perturbation will arise which will make us hurry to quit the company of those to whom we are bound, and for this reason, when we leave one set of companions for another, we are not ridding ourselves of causes of sadness, but only changing them.

    +St. John Cassian, Selected Writings of St. John Cassian the Roman

  • Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.

    ―Rick Warren

  • “For man, who is always striving, never satisfied, always becoming, love is the true human condition.”

    —Georg Simmel

  • I have been so many different people, played so many different roles in my life…I was people I hated and people I admired.

    —Matt Haig, How to Stop Time