Loss of love is always devastating, but it can also be a time for airing out stuffy inner rooms, reassessing values, starting anew. Relationships may become stagnant or wither and die, but life and love continue.
— Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love, p. 204
God speaks to us in a thousand voices, each with the same clear message: “I love you. Please trust me on this one.”
— Hugh Prather, Spiritual Notes to Myself, p. 7
It is a sorry and often heard refrain that “love has vanished from our relationship.” As with many such statements, this is unfair to love. It’s not love that has disappeared from the relationship, we have. Lasting love is not a test of endurance. When we are able to appreciate all the little things which brought us together, and deepen that appreciation over the years, we stay together. Such a relationship is one of life’s great success stories.
— Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love, p. 181
I’ve learned that love is a decision, renewable every day. Every minute, sometimes!
— Debbie Macomber, Knit Together, p. 111
Approach everyone you meet as an individual with dignity and a life as complicated and mysterious as your own. Discard preceonceptions and suspend, even for a moment, the idea that you “know this type.”
Do these things and perhaps you might learn the most important lesson that love can teach us:Â that each person is worthy of our love simply because they are human, one of God’s unique creations, and begin from there.
— Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love, p. 179
When we realize that we are responsible for freeing ourselves from the yokes of the past, we will also free everyone else of this responsibility. Only then can we begin to concentrate more on loving and less on blaming.
— Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love, p. 178
When we are compassionate, we become more realistic in our expectations, less demanding, and more flexible. We are less likely to inflict wounds, hurt feelings, and indulge in recriminations…. When we make the compassionate choice, we enhance the dignity of each individual, which is the very essence of loving them.
— Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love, p. 176
What matters most to me is that God had that son to begin with. And that he has other sons and daughters like me that he loves and doesn’t want to be parted from. That he loves his children as I love my own daughters, only more so, with a hot, knowing, parental love that says, “Be who you are, but love me back. Only love me back.”
— Patty Kirk, Confessions of an Amateur Believer, p. 8
“Love is not about opening old wounds, it’s about healing them.”
— Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love, p. 157
If you want to feel lovable, the easiest way is to be compassionate to someone — a child, friend, stranger — anyone will do.
— Steven Stosny, You Don’t Have to Take It Anymore, p. 110