“Love is the question, love is the answer.” ~ Daniel Johnston

“Fuck shame, make art.” ~ Amanda Palmer

“Create the LOVE you want to see.” – Sylvie Adrienne

“The heart is the toughest part of the body.
Tenderness is in the hands.” ~ Carolyn Forché

“The most vital right is the right to love and be loved.” —Emma Goldman

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.” ~ Thomas Merton

“You serve best by doing the things you love most.” – Father Ray Jackson

“Love is the great protector, protecting us from anger and jealousy.” ~ Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

“Choose love, and don’t ever let fear close your playful heart.” – Jim Carrey

“Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.”  – Oscar Wilde

“I tell you the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” – Vincent van Gogh

“Everything I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything  exists, only because I love.” – Leo Tolstoy

“Until you have loved, you cannot become yourself.” – Emily Dickinson

“Love imperfectly. Be a love idiot. Let yourself forget any love ideal.” – Sark

“For one human being to love another is the most difficult task. It is the work for which all other work is mere preparation.” – Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Stephen Mitchell

“If you do not love too much, you do not love enough.” – Blaise Pascal

“Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk everything, you risk even more.” – Erica Jong

“Fall in love over and over again every day. Love your family, your neighbors, your enemies, and yourself. And don’t stop with humans. Love animals, plants, stones, even galaxies.”  – Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

“To love is to tilt with the lightning, two bodies routed by a single honey’s sweet.” – Pablo Neruda

“The most vital right is the right to love and be loved.” – Emma Goldman

“Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that  you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”– Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Letters to a Young Poet,” translated by Stephen Mitchell

“There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work.” – Anaïs Nin

I LOVE YOU
I love your pilgrim soul and I love your ever-deepening eyes.
I love how unflinchingly you peer into the heart of your own darkness.
I love how you’re making yourself more and more receptive to truths in their wild states.
I love how you can dive into your in passion but never shirk your commitment to the good and the true.
I admire the way you never bear a grudge against the mountains that are in your way, but rather just set to work getting around them.
I love your commitment to deciphering the code you left for yourself before you came into this life. ~ Rob Brezsny, Free Will Astrology

“The secret title of all good poems could be ‘Tenderness.'” ~ Galway Kinnell

“We need to love with as much conviction as those who hate.” ~ Marianne Williamson

“I don’t know if I’ve learned anything yet! I did learn how to have a happy home, but I consider myself fortunate in that regard because I could’ve rolled right by it. Everybody has a superficial side and a deep side, but this culture doesn’t place much value on depth — we don’t have shamans or soothsayers, and depth isn’t encouraged or understood.
Surrounded by this shallow, glossy society we develop a shallow side, too, and we become attracted to fluff. That’s reflected in the fact that this culture sets up an addiction to romance based on insecurity — the uncertainty of whether or not you’re truly united with the object of your obsession is the rush people get hooked on. I’ve seen this pattern so much in myself and my friends and some people never get off that line.
But along with developing my superficial side, I always nurtured a deeper longing, so even when I was falling into the trap of that other kind of love, I was hip to what I was doing. I recently read an article in Esquire magazine called ‘The End of Sex,’ that said something that struck me as very true. It said: “If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one.” What happens when you date is you run all your best moves and tell all your best stories — and in a way, that routine is a method for falling in love with yourself over and over.
You can’t do that with a longtime mate because he knows all that old material. With a long relationship, things die then are rekindled, and that shared process of rebirth deepens the love. It’s hard work, though, and a lot of people run at the first sign of trouble. You’re with this person, and suddenly you look like an asshole to them or they look like an asshole to you — it’s unpleasant, but if you can get through it you get closer and you learn a way of loving that’s different from the neurotic love enshrined in movies. It’s warmer and has more padding to it.”  ~ Joni Mitchell

“The heart knows more than the fearful mind.” ~ Jean Wiley

“Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.” ~ Erich Fromm

“Pain is the first proper step to real compassion; it can be a foundation for understanding all those who struggle with their existence.” ~ David Whyte

“Pain teaches us a fine economy, in movement, in what we choose to do, in the heart’s affections, in what we ask of our selves and eventually in what we ask of others.” ~ David Whyte

“Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth, ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.” — Daniel Ladinsky, inspired by Sufi poet Hafiz

“Justice is what Love looks like in public.” – Cornel West

“Work is to make love visible.”  – Kahil Gibran

“Love is the base energy of the Universe. To feel and face our humanness, our tenderness, our vulnerability is to say yes to love.” ~ Heather Bleasdell, Citizen Witch

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” – Rumi

“But if you don’t start with love, you’ll never end with beauty.” ~ James Altucher

Forgive yourself for the blindness that put you in the path of those who
betrayed you. – Rob Brezsny

A thousand half-loves
must be forsaken to take 
one whole heart home.
-Rumi

“The question of evil refers primarily to the anaesthetized heart, the heart that has no reaction to what it faces, thereby turning the variegated sensuous face of the world into
monotony, sameness, oneness.”  ~ James Hillman

“Listen to your heart. It knows all things because it came from the Soul of the World and it will one day return there.” ~ Paulo Coelho, “The Alchemist”

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“The seemingly contradictory but powerful forces of the broken heart commingled with hope are the enduring underpinnings for effecting ongoing and positive change.” ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“The spectacle of a noble soul striving against adversities and often failing, but never crushed, is one which touches the heart most deeply, and is the proper subject of tragedy.” ~ Richard Wagner

“Love thrives when neither partner takes things personally, so cultivate a devotion to forgiveness and divest yourself of the urge to blame.” – Rob Brezsny

“The true transgression today is no longer sex, but a dedicated commitment to love.” – Slavoj _i_ek

“I am not proud, but I am happy; and happiness blinds, I think, more than pride.” ~ Alexandre Dumas

“If we just offer our hand in love and acceptance, miracles will follow.” ~ Bentzion Groner

“Love is so short, forgetting is so long”.  ~ Pablo Neruda

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.” ~ George Orwell

“Remain true to yourself, child. If you know your own heart, you will always have one friend who does not lie.” ~ Marion Zimmer Bradley

“O, ah! The awareness of emptiness brings forth a heart of compassion!” ~Gary Snyder

How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said. ~Victor Hugo

When you’re in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks. ~Natalie Clifford Barney

“Nothing can be accomplished without love” – Matisse

“Grief is connection, a deep remembering of how much we love this living world, we learn our hearts.” –Jonah Jensen

“There is a sacredness in tears….They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition and of unspeakable love.” ~ Washington Irving

“Open your heart. Someone will come. Someone will come for you. But first you must open your heart.” ~ Kate DiCamillo

“Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.”  ~ Ben Okri

“All your life, you will be faced with a choice. You can choose love or hate…I choose love.” ~ Johnny Cash

“Compassion is the basis of morality.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

“The question of evil refers primarily to the anaesthetized heart, the heart that has no reaction to what it faces, thereby turning the variegated sensuous face of the world into monotony, sameness, oneness.” – James Hillman

“I must learn to love the fool in me — the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries. It alone protects me against that utterly self-controlled, masterful tyrant whom I also harbor and who would rob me of human aliveness, humility, and dignity but for my fool.” – Theodore Rubin

“Giving the best of yourself can be a great gift to the rest of humanity.”~ Leah Whitehorse

“The revolution is Love.” ~ Charles Eisenstien

Humility is a heart quality from which exquisite beauty,elegance, and transcendence arises. You wanna be a really great artist? Then be humble, be quiet, go beyond ego deep into the one heart of all that is. That’s where the most beautiful beauty is. – Geordie Numata, Deer Spirit Reiki

“Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by

 love.”  ― Martin Luther King Jr.

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic, it gives us the energy to act.” – Howard Zinn

“Love restores the bottom line, and not the other way around.” ~Marianne Williamson

“I have always found that actively loving/ saves one from a morbid preoccupation /with the shortcomings of society.” ~Alan Paton

“Did you really think that fear, hatred, violence and control freaks could achieve victory over love, forgiveness and creativity!?” – Geordie Numata, Deer Spirit Reiki

“If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often.”  ~ Leonard Cohen

“Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril.” – Andrew Motion

“Love, like fire, goes out without fuel.”  Mikhail Lermontov

“Love is not a wholly-owned subsidiary of DreamWorks or Disney, so don’t let your romantic story be infected by the entertainment industry’s simplistic, sentimental myths about intimate relationships.” – Rob Brezsny

“It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and persevering courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations.” ― Khalil Gibran

Dr. Maya Angelou – Love Liberates:

“Love has to spring from within.” – Meher Baba

“Love is when you cease hesitating.” ~  Frédéric Beigbeder

“To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.”  ― Osho

“What a revolutionary proposition to realize that your heartbrokenness turns out to be the key to your willingness to remember what it takes to be a human being.” ~ Stephen Jenkinson

“You are my inspiration and my folly. You are my light across the sea, my
million nameless joys, and my day’s wage. You are my divinity, my
madness, my selfishness, my transfiguration and purification. You are my
rapscallionly fellow vagabond, my tempter and star. I want you.” – George Bernard Shaw

“Everyday, say 100 things that you love about yourself.” Sonia Choquette

“Let the beauty you love be what you do. There are thousands of ways we kneel and kiss the earth.” ~ Rumi

“Our hearts resonate at the same frequency as the earth and the universe. Therefore, we are all valuable instruments in the orchestration of the world and its harmony.” ~ Suzy Kassem

“…with our love, we could save the world…” ~ George Harrison

“Who has not sat before his own heart’s curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.”–Rilke

“Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”  ~ Clive Barker

“As much as I love beginner’s mind, though, I advocate an additional
discipline: cultivating a beginner’s heart. That means approaching every
encounter imbued with a freshly invoked wave of love that is as pure as if
you’re feeling it for the first time.” – Rob Brezsny

“In the act of forgiving the ‘other’ the radiance of the self is actually freed…. Enter now into this radiant, flowing wholeness that is offered by the Divine to release anything that you have not, until this moment, loved into wholeness.” – Ariel Spilsburg, 13 Moon Oracle

“I do not understand how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to.” – Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

“Rare as is true love, true friendship is rarer.” Jean de La Fontaine

“We loved with a love that was more than love.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe

“And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone.” -Anne Enright, The Gathering

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
― Albert Einstein

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”  ~ Steve Jobs

“Men complain that women demand reassurance or expressions of love. The Japanese recognized this need, and in ancient times it was an absolute rule that after a night of lovemaking, the man had to produce a poem and have it delivered to his love before she awakened. What was this but the linking of lovemaking to love?” ~ Anais Nin – Eroticism in Women, Playgirl, April 1974.

“You may forget with whom you laughed, but you will never forget with whom you wept.” ― Khalil Gibran

Rama Jyoti Vernon talking about love.

“Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.” ― Khalil Gibran

“The heart of life is a sphere quiet and serene, and the star that shines therein is fixed for evermore.” ― Khalil Gibran

“When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.” ― Khalil Gibran

“Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.” ― Khalil Gibran

“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.”  ~ Nature Boy Eden Ahbez

“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.” ― John Lennon

“Everyday, say a hundred things you love about yourself.” ~ Sonia Choquette

“When we love ourselves, and love what we’re doing, we make the whole world happier.” ~ Dana Gerdhardt

“In love, no question is ever preposterous.”  ~ André Brink

The heart is the toughest part of the body.
Tenderness is in the hands.  ~ Carolyn Forché

“Be real with love! We have so little time here.” – Randi Vanessa Taylor-Habib

“If you work really hard, and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.” ~ Conan O’Brien

“I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.” ― Jonathan Safran Foer

“To love at all is to be vulnerable.” – C.S. Lewis

“Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits; they do not come to coo.” ~ Stanley Kunitz

“Grief changes shape, but it never ends. People have a misconception that you can deal
with it and say, ‘It’s gone, and I’m better.’ They’re wrong.” — Keanu Reeves

“Come on people, now, smile on your brother,
Everybody get together, try to love one another
right now…. ”
—Chet (Chester Williams) Powers, Jr. (1937-1994)
AKA Dino Valenti, Jesse Oris Farrow,
“Let’s Get Together” (1963)

“If we begin to get in touch with whatever we feel with some kind of kindness, our protective shells will melt, and we’ll find that more areas of our lives are workable. AS we learn to have compassion for ourselves, the circle of compassion for others—what and whom we can work with, and how—becomes wider.” – Pema Chodron

“The only reason that we don’t open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don’t feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else’s eyes.” – Pema Chodron

“From the very beginning to the very end, pointing to our own hearts to discover what is true isn’t just a matter of honesty but also of compassion and respect for what we see.” – Pema Chodron

“I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That’s right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that’s kind of perverted or maybe it’s just romantic and highly intelligent.”  ― Sherman Alexie

“Compassion is the basis of morality.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

“Love comforteth like sunshine after rain.” ~ William Shakespeare

A strange passion is moving in my head.
My heart has become a bird
Which searches in the sky.
Every part of me goes in different directions.
Is it really so
That the one I love is everywhere? ~ Rumi

“For small beings such as we, the vastness is only bearable through love.” ~ Carl Sagan

“Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.” ~ Norman Mailer

“Whether or not you believe in God, you can probably sign on to the idea that being kind to others is divine. Just remember to include yourself in that circle of kindness.” ~ Saul Bass

“If grass can grow through cement, love can find you at every time in your life.” – Cher

“We are all born for love. It is the principal of existence, and its only end.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli

“We need 4 hugs a day for survival.
We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance.
We need 12 hugs a day for growth.”
~ Virginia Satir

“I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits.” ~Anais Nin

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish it’s source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.” ~Anais Nin

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” ~ Anais Nin

“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend.” ~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” ~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I suspect the most we can hope for, and it’s no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.” ~Elizabeth Strout

“We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.”  ~Thornton Wilder

“Gratitude is the memory of the heart.”  ~Jean Baptiste Massieu

“Love is stronger than death.” ~ Thomas Merton

“What I’ve come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion.” ~ Chris Abani

“I believe that love that is true and real, creates a respite from death. All cowardice comes from not loving or not loving well, which is the same thing… It is because they make love with sufficient passion, to push death out of their minds… until it returns, as it does, to all men… and then you must make really good love again.” ~ Ernest Hemingway

“Love is how it feels to recognize our essential unity. Awakening to oneness is the experience of Big Love. Knowing you are one with all, you find yourself in love with all.” ~ Timothy Freke

“Remember the emphasis on the heart. The mind lives in doubt and the heart lives in trust. When you trust, suddenly you become centered.” ~ Osho

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“His eyes were wide open. I was holding in my arms the person I loved the most in the world, and talking to him as he died. His heart stopped. He wasn’t afraid. I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life – so beautiful, painful and dazzling – does not get better than that. And death? I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.” – Laurie Anderson

“You do what you love, or you get arrested.” -Lou Reed

“Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart.”  ~ Confucius

“He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing.” – Sherman Alexie, The Toughest Indian In The World

“For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.” ~ D.H. Lawrence

“Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.” ~ Gloria Steinem

“Everytime you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.” – Mother Teresa

“We are not held back by the love we did not receive in the past, but by the love we do not extend in the present.”  ~ by Marianne Williamson

“The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise.” ~ Maya Angelou

“Breathe in, feel your lungs expand.
Let that breath settle, feel yourself expand.
Breath out, expand yourself into the universe.
Settle, feel the universe reverberate.”           — Jeff Cannon

“Meet everyone as if they have a broken heart, because they do.” — Rama Jyoti Vernon

“Love is the greatest power in the Universe, its the greatest healer and it transcends all the boundaries and all borders we have created with our own self-limitations.” — Rama Jyoti Vernon

“Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you.” – Wayne Dyer

“Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdepedence of all things.” -Thomas Merton

“yum, yum, yum, yum . . . ” Anahata Chakra Mantra

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” — Lao Tzu

“I know the way you can get when you have not had a drink of love. Your face hardens. Your sweet muscles cramp.  Children become concerned about a strange look that appears in your eyes… Even angels fear that brand of madness that arrays itself against the world.” —Hafiz

“THE INSIDE OF THE TUNE (THE BRIDGE) IS THE PART THAT MAKES THE OUTSIDE SOUND GOOD.” – Thelonious Monk

“THEY TRIED TO GET ME TO HATE WHITE PEOPLE, BUT SOMEONE WOULD ALWAYS COME ALONG & SPOIL IT.” – Thelonious Monk

“There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I’m too tough for him.” ― Charles Bukowski

“Life’s as kind as you let it be.” ― Charles Bukowski, Hot Water Music

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.” ~ Thomas Merton

“She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.” ~ Simone de Beauvoir