Tao Te Ching
Love
Plato described the ancient myth of humans in the distant past being perfect, round beings that the gods became jealous of and split into the two parts of male and female which are forever seeking to rejoin. It's hard to imagine being a round, male/female being; but, it's easy to identify with the intense longings for union that express themselves through history as sex, love, and marriage. The love part of this is often only a hormonal/genetic reaction or a selfish, disguised pleasure seeking. Of course, it can also mean a deep, romantic connection ground in realistic appreciation, genuine regard, loyalty, and commitment. It can also go far beyond personal attraction and manifest as compassion and a universal dedication to working for the physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being of all life.
Quotes (120)
“If rulers really promoted them, people would turn to universal love and mutual benefit as naturally as fire tuns upward or water turns downward. Nothing in the world could stop them.”
“There was a time when male and female were one but God cut them into two and each became a half-shadow always searching for the other half. This desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.”
“Chuang-tzu’s wife died. When Hui-tzu came to offer his condolences, he found him pounding on a tub and singing… Chuang-tzu said, ‘The same process that brought her to birth, in time brought her to death, as naturally as fall turns into winter and spring into summer... if I went around wailing and pounding my chest, it would only show that I didn’t understand the first thing about reality.’”
“Why place so much importance on love and loss of love when we know one day we must leave everyone?”
“Would anyone fall in love if he had never heard or read about such a delirium?”
“Propitious Queen of Love whose vital power, air, earth and sea supplies… by they prolific might, springs and beholds the regions of the light”
“Every person creates his own world, according to that which he fears and that which he loves”
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”
“Some have believed it was a madness... Those who are in love must be forgiven as though ill.”
“If your mind wanders away, do not follow it. A mind disturbed by love and aversion is deluded; a mind free from delusion and reality alike is real, the Buddha-Mind.”
“When right and wrong, other and self exist in their midst, love and hate will arise and attach each other. When love and hate arise and attack each other, warfare will flourish.”
“If thou and I be sitting in the wilderness, —
that would be a joy to which no sultan can set bounds.”
“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.”
“Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good.”
“Love may turn into an inordinate clinging to the love object, compassion can turn into sentimentality and a feeling of helplessness, joy can turn into a feeling of elation and over-excitement that gets lost in unrealistic goals, but equanimity brings us back to solid ground. It’s still vulnerable to apathy but this is countered by love completing the cycle.”
“And since you may not justly love deny, then take it as a virtue of the mind… For love at last must all constrain and bind… therefore pray take heed to follow love that best can guide and lead.”
“Don't forget love; it will bring all the madness you need to unfurl yourself across the universe.”
“Love, what a strange and wonderful thing that can give me life and deprive me of wits.”
“Love in young men for the most part is not love but sexual desire, and its accomplishment is the end.”
“Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. Love still stands when all else has fallen.”
“Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.”
“The relation of the sexes is really the invisible and central point of all action and conduct... the cause of war and the end of peace; the basis of what is serious, the key to all illusions, and the meaning of all mysterious hints.”
“Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
Is—Love, forgive us!—cinders, ashes, dust;
Love in a palace is perhaps at last
More grievous torment that a hermit's fast.”
“Love is a religion, and its rituals cost more than those of other religions. It goes by quickly and, like a street urchin, it likes to mark its passage by a trail of devastation.”
“See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.”
“Love to throw yourself on the earth and kiss it with an unceasing, consuming love. Love all men, love everything. Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love those tears. This is a great gift of God not given to many. Prize it.”
“When our hearts grow soft with infinite, universal, unquenchable love and we realize that each one of us is responsible for all of mankind and for every individual person, we will have the power to win over the whole world.”
“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
“The real man wants two different things: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.” 
“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”
“Beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love.”
“All love is expansion, all selfishness is contraction. Love is therefore the only law of life. He who loves lives, he who is selfish is dying. Therefore love for love's sake, because it is the only law of life, just as you breathe to live.”
“Love, however, cannot be forbidden. The more that flame is covered up, the hotter it burns. Love can always find a way.”
“Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.”
“Love can flourish only as long as it is free and spontaneous; it tends to be killed by the thought of duty. To say that it is your duty to love so-and-so is the surest way to cause you to hate him of her.”
“If you go to thinking take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love.”
“One can beg, buy, be presented with and find love in the streets, but it can never be stolen.”
“Clothed in no garment save that of beauty… they chanted melodies woven from dreams of love”
“Be it animals, birds, or humans, at each whirl of the dance the ephemeral masks are thrown off and behind all of them the same face is always revealed, the eternal face of love.”
“And think not that you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.”
“And so the first moment [he] put his eyes on her she was laughing and the sunlight fell on her and he saw her like this, her hair shining black and her cheeks red and her lips red and her teeth white and her head throw back in laughter, and he was struck as though a sword had fallen across his heart.”
“You want to be loved because you do not love; but the moment you love, it is finished, you are no longer inquiring whether or not somebody loves you.”
“As long as we invent and progress in mechanical things and not in love, we shall not achieve happiness.”
“A man who knows that he is silent, or knows that he loves, doesn’t know what love is, nor what silence is.”
“All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase— 'I love you.'”
“In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love, you want the other person.”
“A billion men have since professed his way and never followed it... What Christ is saying always, what he never swerves from saying, what he says a thousand times and in a thousand different ways... is love.”
“Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.”
“If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers...”
“Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.”
“Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. 'Patriotism' is its cult... Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.”
“Jealousy doesn't show how much you love someone, only how insecure you are.”
“Love is something that you can leave behind when you die. It's that powerful... it will roam and travel.”
“When people get married because they think it’s a long time love affair, they’ll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment… if the marriage isn’t a first priority in your life, you’re not married.”
“I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
“Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political forces.”
“To love in the sense of passion-love is the contrary of to live. It is an impoverishment of one's being, an askesis without sequel, an inability to enjoy the present without imagining it as absent, a never-ending flight from possession.”
“Without love, we are self-centered, but love enables us to move the center of our lives outside our ego… it expands our lives”
“When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence. How can you love if you are not there?”
“Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”
“When we love, we think that we love an object. But really, love is inherent without the subject and only reflects to the object.”
“Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God”
“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.”
“It matters not who you love, where you love, why you love, when you love or how you love, it matters only that you love.”
“There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done, nothing you can sing that can’t be sung... all you need is love”
“I don't know how someone controlled you, they bought and sold you. I look at you all see the love there that's sleeping
While my guitar gently weeps”
“If she's amazing, she won't be easy. If she's easy, she won't be amazing. If she's worth it, you wont give up. If you give up, you're not worthy... Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.”
“I must be in love with this woman... I don't have any choice... Danger may be lurking there, I might end up losing everything but there's no turning back even if it means I'll be burned up and gone forever.”
“lasting love is something a person has to decide to experience. Lifelong monogamous devotion is just not natural — not for women even, and emphatically not for men. It requires, for lack of a better term, what we can call an act of will.”
“Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity… We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?”
“Love is fusion in the sun’s core. Love is blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and its absence is the difference between life and death.”
“If love were a product, the queue at the faulty goods desk would stretch right round the universe and back. It doesn't work properly. The seams come apart and it's full of powdered glass.”
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