Human Love.
Also Friendship.

This is my commandment: love one another, as I have loved you. A man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends. John 15:12-13

Whoever is a loving person has been born of God and knows God. 1 John 4:7.

You have learnt how it was said: You must love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I say to you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you; in this way you will be sons of your father in heaven (...). For if you love those who love you, what right have you to claim any credit? (...) Matthew 5:44-46

Whoever loves and respects you, offer that love to the Lord. When you are incapable to carry even your own responsibilities, then how can you carry the burden of others? Shanti Vachan Bhandar, 443.

If you respect the feelings of others as much as you do your own, therein lies nobility and tenderness of your heart. Shanti Vachan Bhandar, 797.

Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you. Confucius' Golden Rule, quoted after: Novak Philip, The World's Wisdom, P.127.

To enable the deluded souls unite with the Lord is the noblest deed and greatest affection. Shanti Vachan Bhandar, 1012.

Gain victory over hatred with love. Shanti Vachan Bhandar, 1084.

I want to raise the character of man so high that people as different as the lion and the goat can live together without jealousy or hatred - only in love. Teachings of Babaji, P.26.

Like spreading light by lighting one candle from another all around a room, so we should spread love from heart to heart. Teachings of Babaji, P.26.

Beg Lord for mercy even for those who hate you and cause hardship to you. Shanti Vachan Bhandar, 1086.

Maintain good relations with one and all. Treat everyone with a pure, true and loving heart. Shanti Vachan Bhandar, 2087.

(...) you should look to the areas of your countries where people are poverty-stricken and helpless and then do all you can to raise their standard of living, teaching them cleanliness and high morals. To serve the needy truly and from the heart is true service to God. (...) Teachings of Babaji, P.64.

The person is a being for whom the only suitable dimension is love. (...) Love for a person excludes the possibility of treating him as an object of pleasure. (...) In fact, the commandment of love is not limited to excluding all behavior that reduces the person to a mere object of pleasure. It requires more; it requires the affirmation of the person as a person. John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, P.201.

(...) the most important thing about love is the sincere gift of self. In this sense the person is realized through love. John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, P.202.

We ought to love our friends, but without encroaching upon the love due to God, which must be the principal. Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, P.55.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning. Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tender branches that quiver in the sun, so shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to earth. Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, P.11.

All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's heart. Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, P.12.

Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; for love is sufficient unto love. Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, P.13.

When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather, "I am in the heart of God." And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course. Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, P.13.

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself. But if you love and must needs have desires, let it be your desires:

To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To know the pain of too much tenderness. To be wounded by your own understanding of love; and to bleed willingly and joyfully. To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving. To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy; to return home at eventide with gratitude. And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips. Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, P.13-14.

Very few men are sanctified in isolation. Very few become perfect in absolute solitude. Living with other people and learning to lose ourselves in the understanding of their weakness and deficiencies can help us to become true contemplatives. For there is no better means of getting rid of the rigidity and harshness and coarseness of our ingrained egoism, which is the one insuperable obstacle to the infused light and action of the Spirit of God. Even the courageous acceptance of interior trials in utter solitude cannot altogether compensate for the work of purification accomplished in us by patience and humility in loving other men and sympathizing with their most unreasonable needs and demands. Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, P.191.

External things mean nothing to pure love; it cuts through them all. Neither prison doors nor the gates of heaven are strongenough to stop it. It reaches God himself, and nothing can quench it. It knows no obstacles; it is free like a queen and has free access to all places. Death itself must bow its head before it (...). Faustina Kowalska, The Diary, 201.

Act with love. Let your only instrument always be love. By love turn everything into good which satan desires to destroy and possess. Only that way shall you be completely mine and I shall be able to help you. Our Lady of Medjugorie, July 31, 1986. Words from Heaven, P.69.

Without love you will achieve nothing. Our Lady of Medjugorie, December 13, 1984. Words from Heaven, P.70.

Make a decision for love. Our Lady of Medjugorie, November 20, 1986. Words from Heaven, P.71.

By love you will be able to do even that which you think is impossible. Our Lady of Medjugorie, November 7, 1985. Words from Heaven, P.72.

Pray, because in prayer each one of you will be able to achieve complete love. Our Lady of Medjugorie, October 25, 1987. Words from Heaven, P.73.

God does not want you lukewarm or undecided, but that you totally surrender to Him. You know that I love you and that I am burning out of love for you. Therefore, dear children, you also make a decision for love so you will burn out of love and daily experience God's love. Dear children, decide for love so that love prevails in all of you. But not human love, rather God's love. Our Lady of Medjugorie, November 20, 1986. Words from Heaven, P.74.

Love your enemies. Pray for them and bless them. Our Lady of Medjugorie, June 26, 1983. Words from Heaven, P.147.

(…) These days are the days when you need to decide for God, for peace, and for the good. May every hatred and jealousy disappear from your life and your thoughts, and may there only dwell love for God and your neighbor. Thus, only thus, shall you be able to discern the signs of this time. (…) Our Lady of Medjugorie, January 25, 1993. Words from Heaven, P.270.

All through the Verba Seniorum we find a repeated insistence on the primacy of love over everything else in the spiritual life: over knowledge, gnosis, asceticism, contemplation, solitude, prayer.  Love in fact IS the spiritual life, and without it all the other exercises of the spirit, however lofty, are emptied of content and become mere illusion...Love means an interior and spiritual identification with one's brother, so that he is not regarded as an "object" to "which" one "does good." Merton, Thomas. The Wisdom of the Desert. PP. 17, 18. Submitted to L-Center Discussion Group by Gary Horn <horngary@aol.com>

Without Goodness (jen) a person cannot for long endure adversity, and cannot for long enjoy prosperity. Confucius, quoted after: Novak Philip, The World's Wisdom, P.128.

The soft overcomes the hard; the gentle overcomes the rigid. Everyone knows this is true, but few can put it into practice. Tao Te Ching 78, quoted after: Novak Philip, The World's Wisdom. P.161.

I have placed you in the midst of your fellows that you may do to them what you cannot do to me, that is to say that you may love your neighbor of free grace without expecting any return from him, and what you do to him I count as done to me.  Taken from the dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena (1347-80). Quoted after: The Fire of Silence and Stillness, P.32

A boy and a girl fall in love, and after a time they fall out of love. Romance with human beings is imperfect. The romance with God is perfect and everlasting. Paramahansa Yogananda, Man's Eternal Quest, P.71.

When you have an impulse to befriend others, it is the presence of God that you feel. Friendship is a divine impulse. (...) He comes as friends to give us opportunities to express unconditional love from our hearts. Paramahansa Yogananda, Man's Eternal Quest, P.156.

The greatest art of making friends is to behave divinely yourself - to be spiritual, to be pure, to be unselfish - and to start friendship where the foundation of friendship has already been laid in a past life. Paramahansa Yogananda, Man's Eternal Quest, P.156.

Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. Matthew 5:44.

When you learn to live for others, they will live for you. When you live for yourself, no one is interested in you. You can best attract others by your good actions. Paramahansa Yogananda, Man's Eternal Quest, P.143.

True friendship is divine love, for it is unconditional and it is real and lasting. Paramahansa Yogananda, Man's Eternal Quest, P.157.

Friendship can be built only on a basis of freedom and spiritual equality. Therefore you should treat everyone in that divine light, in the consciousness that each person is an image of God. Paramahansa Yogananda, Man's Eternal Quest, P.158.

Friendship is a great universal force. When your desire for friendship is strong enough, though an unknown person who is spiritually attuned to you be living at the South Pole, the magnetism of friendship will nevertheless draw you together. Paramahansa Yogananda, Man's Eternal Quest, P.158.

Unless we are united with all of His children through a spirit of friendliness, we will not be united with God. Paramahansa Yogananda, Man's Eternal Quest, P.159.

When that awakening comes, you are in love with all. You see that everyone is your Father's child, and the love you feel for all beings never dies. It grows, increasingly until you realize, in the love of friends, the divine love of God. Paramahansa Yogananda, Man's Eternal Quest, P.159.

(...) the most wonderful way to smile is to fill your heart with the love of God. Then you will be able to love everybody; you will be able to smile all the time. Paramahansa Yogananda, Man's Eternal Quest, P.173.

Love is our true destiny.  We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it in another.  We do not discover the secret of our lives merely by study and calculation in our own isolated meditations.  The meaning of our life is a secret that has to be revealed to us in love, by the one we love.  And if this love is unreal, the secret will not be found, the meaning will never reveal itself, the message will never be decoded.  At best, we will receive a scrambled and partial message, one that will deceive and confuse us.  We will never be fully real until we let ourselves fall in love - either with another human person or with God. Thomas Merton, Love and Living. Submitted by Gary Horn.

A disciple means one in whom the guru perfects the state of divine friendship. Paramahansa Yogananda, Man's Eternal Quest, P.228.

The mother is an expression of the unconditional love of God. Mothers were created by God to show us that He loves us with or without cause. Paramahansa Yogananda, Man's Eternal Quest, P.246.

Those who think of woman as an object of lust perish in that fire; but those who look upon all women as incarnations of the Divine Mother find in them a sacredness that is inviolable. Paramahansa Yogananda, Man's Eternal Quest, P.246-7.

The mother who looks upon all God's children as her own is no longer a mortal mother. She becomes the Mother immortal. (...) And why not? The Universal Mother made you in Her image and you should manifest that image be bestowing on all beings Her illimitable love. Paramahansa Yogananda, Man's Eternal Quest, P.248.

 I think I can say I have experienced levels of loneliness that most people do not allow themselves consciously to admit.  From a certain point of view I can say bluntly that to exist as a man without relating to one particular woman-and-person who is "my love," is quite simply a kind of death.  But I have enough experience of human love to realize, too, that even within the best of relationships between man and woman this loneliness and death are also terribly present.  There are moments in human love in
which loneliness is completely transcended, but these are brief and deceptive, and they can point only to the further and more difficult place where, ultimately, two lonely and helpless persons elect to save one another from absurdity by being absurd together - and for life.  This implies, of course, a fantastic amount of honesty and courage, and a readiness to admit all that is humiliating, unpleasant, small, petty, undesirable, even nasty in each other - and to learn in a very hard way that freedom and acceptance of human limitations are more important than captivity to the need to seek someone else, somewhere else, or something else, some other condition, some impossible perfection.
   In other words, agape is better than eros.  It is only by freely accepting a pathetically limited condition that we can rise above ourselves and be fully human.  To reject our limitation in a quest for some imaginary godlikeness or some sublime fulfillment (in which there would be no limitation and no problem), simply is to lie to ourselves. Thomas Merton, in an interview in Motive magazine, 1967.Submitted to Merton-L Discussion Group by Gary Horn.

If love were only spiritual,
the practices of fasting and prayer would not exist.
The gifts of lovers to one another are,
in respect to love, nothing but forms;
yet they testify
to invisible love.

Rumi, Mathnawi I, 2625-2627, quoted in: Helminski, Kabir (2000). The Rumi Collection. P.6.

By love what is bitter becomes sweet,
bits of copper turn to gold.
By love the dregs are made clear,
and pain begins to heal.
By love the dead come alive,
and a king becomes a slave.
(...)

Rumi, Mathnawi II, 1529-1535, quoted in: Helminski, Kabir (2000). The Rumi Collection. P.45.

subtle degrees
of domination and servitude
are what you know as love

but love is different
it arrives complete
just there
like the moon in the window
(...)

love is the sea of not being
and there intellect drowns
(...)

a million galaxies
are a little scum
on that shoreless sea

Rumi, Subtle Degrees, quoted in: Helminski, Kabir (2000). The Rumi Collection. P.49-50.

Are you fleeing from Love because of a single humiliation?
What do you know of Love except the name?

Rumi, Mahnawi V, 1163, quoted in: Helminski, Kabir (2000). The Rumi Collection. P.192.

Spread love everywhere you go: first of all in your own house. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next door neighbor... Let no one ever come to you without leaving better or happier. Be the living expression of kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile; kindness in your warm greeting. Ascribed to Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Submitted by: Barb. OGN #586.

He who has acquired love endures calmly and patiently the injuries and sufferings that his enemies inflict on him. St. Thalassios the Libyan (VI-VII Century C.E.), quoted in: (1981). The Philokalia. Vol. II., P.307.

He who does nothing to dispel love is precious in the sight of God and among men.

Do not wonder what others are like but to the best of your ability what they may become through your influence. William of Saint Thierry, Golden Epistle 21, quoted in: Pennington, Basil. (1978). O Holy Mountain! Journal of a Retreat on Mount Athos. P.103.

(…) There is a powerful delegation in us that lobbies every moment for contentment. How will you ever find peace unless you yield to love the way the gracious earth does to out hand’s impulse. Rabia (c.717-801), quoted in: Ladinsky Daniel (2002). Love Poems from God. Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West.  P.14.

We bless the earth with each step we take. And the firmament too needs our touch: someday your tenderness will reach it. (…) The seas waited too long to sing. Not until we leaped out laughing was their birth of us complete. “Tell me about your heart,” my every word says. Speak to me as if we both lay wounded in a field and are gazing in wonder as our spirits rise. St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226), quoted in: Ladinsky Daniel (2002). Love Poems from God. Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West. P.51.


Last updated: 2013/07/28

See the related subjects: Compassion, Filial Piety, Humanism, Marriage, Patience, Service.
 

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