Love is: adoration, worship, yearning, affection, tenderness, beloved, dear, appreciation, cherished, a treasure, devotion, regard, making giant leaps.
Love makes you feel connected and hyper-alive. It is caring for another person or thing actively, without regard to its emotional or physical cost. Love is endless potential, but it must be cared for and maintained or it will evaporate. While people do things out of character in the name of love (lie, act rashly, be unkind to others), love itself is a purely positive, nurturing force. People try to protect others in the name of love by using forces that are anything but love.
Love Meditation: Writers’ thoughts on love through the centuries
“Harmony is pure love, for love is complete agreement.” Lope de Vega, Fuenteovejuna (1613)
“That Love is all there is,/ In all we know of Love; / It is enough, the freight should be/ Proportioned to the groove.” Emily Dickinson (No. 1765)
“Love is the fulfilling of the law.” Romans 13:10
“Love is most nearly itself/ When here and now cease to matter./ Old men ought to be explorers/ Here and there does not matter/ We must be still and still moving/ Into another intensity/ For a further union, a deeper communion/ Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,/ The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters/ Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.” T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (1940)
“Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O, No! it is an ever-fixed mark, That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error, and upon me prov’d, I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.” William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
“Youth’s the season made for joys, Love is then our duty.” John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (1728)
“Love kindled by virtue always kindles another, provided that its flame appear outwardly.” Dante, Divine Comedy, Inferno (1321)
“Love knows nothing of order.” St. Jerome
“And we are out on earth a little space,/ That we may learn the beams of love,/ And these black bodies and this sunburnt face/ Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.” William Blake, The Little Black Boy (1790)