Quotes About Love

To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God. —WILLIAM TEMPLE

To be effective pray-ers, we need to be effective lovers.

Of this much we can be sure: if we love the creation, we will learn from it. In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevski counsels, "Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day."4

To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God. —WILLIAM TEMPLE To

Grant me, Lord, to know what I ought to know, to love what I ought to love, to praise what delights you most, to value what is precious in your sight, and to hate what is offensive to you. Amen. —Thomas à Kempis

It is only because of your love, only your love, that the poor will forgive you the bread you give them.

God is big enough to receive us with all our mixture. We do not have to be bright, or pure, or filled with faith, or anything. That is what grace means, and not only are we saved by grace, we live by it as well. And we pray by it.

Lord Jesus, as it would please you bring me someone today whom I can serve.

There is no place where God is not, wherever I go, there God is. Now and always he upholds me with his power and keeps me safe in his love. —Anonymous

The Spiritual Disciplines are the means of God's grace for bringing about genuine personality formation characterized through and through by love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control (Gal. 5:22–23).

A Christian's speech should bless, not berate or abuse. The tongue betrays the world that is in one's heart; it is a microcosm of the inner self.

Remember the heart of the Father; he is like a shepherd who will risk anything to find that one lost sheep. We do not have to make God willing to forgive. In fact, it is God who is working to make us willing to seek his forgiveness.

True godliness does not turn us away from hurting, bleeding humanity. Rather it enables us to live fully alive in the midst of human need and enlivens our abilities to bring a healing presence to the bruised and broken around us.

Love, not anger, brought Jesus to the cross. Golgotha came as a result of God's great desire to forgive, not his reluctance. Jesus knew that by his vicarious suffering he could actually absorb all the evil of humanity and so heal it, forgive it, redeem it.

the true test of spirituality [is] in the freedom to live among people compassionately....Prayer frees us to be controlled by God.

Every woman needs one man in her life who is strong and responsible. Given this security, she can proceed to do what she really wants to do-fall in love with men who are weak and irresponsible.

We will spend the rest of the day inventing a kind of love that no longer exists in the world, a kind of love no army can pillage at the outposts, no rumor could bring to its knees like a traitor.

There are desires we haven't named yet, loves so impossible they have to be true. — Richard Jackson, from "Incompleteness," The Heart as Framed: New and Selected Poems (Press 53, 2022)

For a moment you are asleep in my heart. What more can I ask for? I am rocking inside your breaths. I have turned into the words you whisper. When I speak to you, I clothe my heart with your heart. When you tighten and tremble into love, these dreams wander into distant fields and leave no tracks, I have never been so lost, I have never been so certain of where I am. from "The Story

There is always another heart within the heart, for / what we own is never what we have, what we love / is never what we own — Richard Jackson, from "Francis' Prayer," Broken Horizons (Press 53, 2018)

Maybe the real is the way your palms fit against my face, or the way you hold my life inside you until it is nothing at all, the way this plant droops, this flower called Heart's Bursting Flower, with its beads of red hanging from their delicate threads any breeze might break, any word might shatter, any hurt might crush. — Richard Jackson, Superstition Review issue 2 fall 2008

Sometimes I think the soul is a shadow even gravity can't touch, and love is what passes in the mirror as we look away. from "Desperate Note from Byron's Palace in Lerici

Sometimes it seems that all our words, even those for love, are written in another language. And yet they still arrive, distant, full of their own silences which may be what allows us to invent another story, what saves us. What is the word for the kind of love the woman shows now? A word that contains the whole story the way her lamp contains her room, — Richard Jackson, from "The Whole Story," Resonance: Poems (The Ashland Poetry Press, 2010)

And what does a single feather mean except the love we treasure, or a butterfly mean except the dreams we chase, the way those doves chased whatever called them from beyond the park, something beyond words, beyond the sky that gives away nothing except the longing to discover how love creates its own endless skies. — Richard Jackson, from "Poem for Amy," Broken Horizons (Press 53, 2018)