20) One word frees us of all the weight and pain in life, that word is Love.
~ Socrates

19) Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend.
~ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

18) Whenever you are confronted with an opponent. Conquer him with love.
~ Mahatma Gandhi

17) Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.
~ Deuteronomy 6:5

16) We can only learn to love by loving.
~ Iris Murdoch

15) If you would be loved, love and be lovable.
~ Benjamin Franklin

14) There is more hunger for love and appreciation in this world than for bread.
~ Mother Teresa

13) Love cannot endure indifference. It needs to be wanted. Like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another's heart, or its flame burns low.
~ Henry Ward Beecher

12) A heart that loves is always young.
~ A Greek Proverb

11) Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
~ Iris Murdoch

10) We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

9) One is very crazy when in love.
~ Sigmund Freud

8) Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength; loving someone deeply gives you courage.
~ Lao Tzu

7) Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
~ C. S. Lewis

6) To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.
~ Mark Twain

5) A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.
~ John 15:34-35

4) Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.
~ Sigmund Freud

3) Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves.
~ Blaise Pascal

2) Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction.
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

And the #1 quote is...

1) If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love I gain nothing Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away...And now these things remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
~ 1 Corinthians 13:1-8, 13

Those of us today who seek to be Christians, and who have not yet risen to the level of full maturity in Christ, tend unfortunately to take one or other of the debased forms of love for the action of the Spirit of God and the love of Christ. It is this failure to attain to full maturity in love which keeps divisions alive in the world. There is a "moantic" tendency in some Christians- a tendency which seeks Christ not in love of those flesh-and-blood brothers and sisters with whom we love and work, but in some as yet unrealized ideal of "brotherhood". It is always a romantic evasion to turn from the love of people to the love of love itself: to love people in general more than individual persons, to love "brotherhood and "unity" more than one's brothers, sisters, neighbors, and associates. This corruption of love can be romantic also in its love of God. It is no longer Christ himself that is loved and sought, but perhaps an objectified "experience" of Christ's, a degree of prayer, a mystical state. What is loved then ceases to be Christ, but the subjective reactions which are aroused in me but the supposed presence of Christ in thought or love or prayer. The romantic tendency leads to a substitution of aestheticism, or false mysticism, or quietism, for genuine faith and love, and what it seeks in the Church is not so much reality as a protection against responsibility. Failing to establish a true dialogue with our brother or sister in Christ, this fallacy thwarts all efforts a real unity and cooperation among Christians.
~ Thomas Merton

When I have learned to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards that state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest at all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased.
~ C.S. Lewis

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