Valentine's has become one of my favorite days of the year. I say "become" because I have learned a great deal through the years (and am still learning) the pure joy that comes from giving love with absolutely no thought or care of getting any in return. I think it's the same as the true Spirit of Christmas. It is in the "losing of myself" that I find love. Of course, Christ gave the perfect example and "
We love Him because He first loved us." (Herein is the key to true power and true influence.) In honor of this "True Love", I have compiled some of my most treasured quotes on what love really is and how it can be discovered!!
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"Pursue love by striving to give it rather than possess it. Coupling love and ambition fools us into approaching the whole business backwards. Rather than pursuing love by giving ourselves away, we wind up trying to capture love with a new and improved version of ourselves. This sucks the freedom out of love and it sucks the joy out of excellence... No longer shackled by uncertainty and anxiety to your doomed project of capturing love, the joy of ambition, of excellence pursued for its own sake, begins to shine. Work that was only a grinding means to an end gets lit with meaning as an end in itself. Unencumbered by a fear of failing, secure in the perfect love passing through you, you put your shoulder to the wheel, you whistle while you work, and the work itself becomes a more perfect expression of an already perfect love."
- Adam S. Miller (Letters to a Young Mormon)
“We think we have to change, grow and be good in order to be loved. But rather we are loved and we receive His grace so we can change, grow and be good.”
- John Powell
"Instead of allowing yourself to be unhappy, just let your love grow as God wants it to grow. Seek goodness in others. Love more persons more -- love them more impersonally, more unselfishly, without thought of return. The return, never fear, will take care of itself."
- Henry Drummond
"To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love forever is to live forever."
- Henry Drummond
"You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments that stand out, the moments when you have really lived, are the moments when you have done things in a spirit of love."
- Henry Drummond
"Since we are what we are by the impacts of those who surround us, those who surround themselves with the highest will be those who change into the highest. There are some men and some women in whose company we are always at our best. While with them we cannot think mean thoughts or speak ungenerous words. Their mere presence is elevation, purification, sanctity."
- Henry Drummond
"Friendship is a spiritual thing. It is independent of matter, or space or time. That which I love in my friend is not that which I see. What influences me in my friend is not his body but his spirit. He influences me about as much in his absence as in his presence."
- Henry Drummond
“There are many souls whom I have loved stronger than death. To them I have proved faithful—to them I am determined to prove faithful, until God calls me to resign up my breath.”
- Joseph Smith
"These love the God that I serve; they love the truths that I promulgate; they love those virtuous, and those holy doctrines that I cherish in my bosom with the warmest feelings of my heart, and with that zeal which cannot be denied. "
- Joseph Smith
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
- C.S. Lewis
"Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies."
-Aristotle
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