Love: the only revolutionary force capable of producing anything new.

The thing that attracted people to Pasternak was not a social or political theory, it was not a formula for the unification of mankind, not a collectivist panacea for all the evils in the world: it was the man himself, the truth that was in him, his simplicity, his direct contact with life, and the fact that he was full of the only revolutionary force that is capable of producing anything new: he is full of love...

 Like Dostoyevsky, Pasternak holds that man's future depends on his ability to work his way out from under a continuous succession of authoritarian rulers who promise him happiness at the cost of his freedom.

~Thomas Merton, Disputed Questions on the life and work of Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago

A person's life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened. 
            - Albert Camus

I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return'd
Yet out of that I have written these songs.    
       - Whitman, Calamus, Leaves Of Grass

I honor your Gods
I drink from your well
I bring an unprotected heart to our meeting place.
I hold no cherished outcome
I will not negotiate by withholding
I am not subject to disappointment. 
- Druid Friendship vow.

Go often to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.
     - Thoreau, in his journal. Thoreau and the Art Of Life

More from Thoreau and his journals:

Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.
     - Henry David Thoreau, Journal entry, 1841

Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.
- (undated)

Love is an attempt to change a piece of a dream-world into reality.
- (undated)

In the love of narrow souls I make many short voyages but in vain - I find no sea room - but in great souls I sail before the wind without a watch, and never reach the shore.
- (undated)

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
- (undated)

Between whom there is hearty truth, there is love.
- (undated)

There is no remedy for love but to love more.
     -Journal entry, 1839

And now another friendship is ended. I do not know what has made my friend doubt me, but I know that in love there is no mistake, and that every estrangement is well-founded.
- Journal entry, February 8, 1857

I am in love with this world. I have nestled lovingly in it. I have climbed its mountains, roamed its forests, sailed its waters, crossed its deserts, felt the sting of its frosts, the oppression of its heats, the drench of its rains, the fury of its winds, and always have beauty and joy waited upon my goings and comings.
       - John Burroughs, (American naturalist and writer 1837-1921)

Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
      - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Tao arms with love those it would protect.
-        FJ MacHovec , The Book of Tao

Within us is the soul of the whole; the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is related.
     When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through our will, it is virtue; when it flows through our affections, it is love.
-       Ralph Waldo Emerson

I suppose integrity is the most important quality in life; next is love--not a sentimental, but a whole love, including affection.  I try each day not to react to all the problems and peculiarities that would prevent my living the life that will make those around me glad I'm with them.  I'm glad I'm with them.
      - Jean Horton Berg

There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham. 
- Anna Sewell

Love is the affirmative of affirmatives. 
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Brothers Karamazov:  The monk, on his deathbed: 

Love all the earth, every ray of God's light, every grain of sand or blade of grass, every living thing.  If you love the earth enough, you will know the divine mystery.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky

Let us keep this truth before us.  You say you have no faith?  Love--and faith will come.  You say you are sad?  Love--and joy will come.  You say you are alone?  Love--and you will break out of your solitude.  You say you are in hell?  Love--and you will find yourself in heaven.  Heaven is love.
      - Carlo Carretto , In Search Of The Beyond

Love is little
Love is low
Love will make our spirit grow.

Grow in Peace
Grow in Light
Love will do the
Thing that's right.
      - Shaker song

The true source of joy is love –- love of God, love of beauty, love of wisdom, love of another human being, it does not matter which. It is all one love: a joyful awareness of dissolving boundaries of our ordinary narrow self, of being one with the reality beyond, of being made whole.
       - Irma Zaleski, The Door To Joy

All earthly matters are cheats and casualties if we insist on an apparent consistency, if we look frantically in geology or physics or religion for the appearance of continuity of things, which is a pattern of change too vast and radiant for human theory to encompass. Rocks battered here by fire were battered there by flood. Yesterday’s immutable atom is today’s fleeting quantum. God does not say the same thing on Sinai as He does in Galilee.

      Yet the universe is not random. There is a consistent message. It is not understand but see; not know but love.
- David Brendan Hopes, A Sense Of Morning– Nature through New Eyes

When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music. To love life through labor is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret. All work is empty save when there is love, for work is love made visible.
- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. Galatians 5:22, 23

Love is love's reward.
- John Dryden

It's when we surrender control, let go of our egos, that all the love in the world is there waiting for us. Love is not a game, it's a state of being.
      - Henry Miller, Reflections, edited by Twinka Thiebaud

...that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.
- William Wordsworth

Reed Stowe, Heron Dance interview. During our interview, Reed talked about sailing around the world for one thousand days without resupply and without touching land. He did that (2007-2010). Here’s an excerpt from our interview.

Love is how I do what I do.  Love pervades everything.  That love is within yourself.  You bring love in your life by imagining love coming out from your center all the time.  All of your actions and moves and everything you do.  When I am not doing that it is because I am weak.  I am human, and I'm insecure and afraid.  Otherwise, I am always pouring out love.  And when I'm not, I'm making a mistake.  I am not perfect enough, strong enough.  But most of the time I am giving it out.  My love and my creativity and the way that I live life.  I want that to be a part of every situation.  Enjoying everything that I see that is beautiful.  When I am holding it back, when I am insecure, I am weak.  When I am hungry, when I am insecure because I don't have enough money, when I feel someone is threatening me, that is because I am not giving out more love.
If you are a surfer, the critical place to be is where the wave becomes an ellipse or a tube.  That moment, when the wave becomes an ellipse near the shore, is the most intense perfection--like the center of the universe or the center of an atom.  A spiral form.  The center of that hurricane or that spiral.  When you are in that you forget about the rest of the world.  You get totally fulfilled.  After all of the years it took to put yourself there, now you have reached fulfillment.  When you work yourself into the place you want to be, where you experience intensity physically and mentally, where you have been preparing your whole life--everything is in the moment.  There really are no choices to make.  There are choices to make before and after but not during.
The best person you are at the moment.  The amount of willpower that you have, the amount of love that you are able to give out, the skills that you have physically, mentally, intellectually.  When you truly come in contact with your true self and what you want and who you are--there is no real choices to make.  You go ahead and do what you have to do.
Everything that you do is like walking on the edge of the sword.  Walking on an intense path to enlightenment.  Every move you make has a lot of significance.  You remember love, and you keep your mind totally focused. 

Gandhi: It is not nonviolence if we merely love those that love us.  It is nonviolence only when we love those that hate us.  I know how difficult it is to follow this grand law of love.  But are not all great and good things difficult to do?  Love of the hater is the most difficult of all.  But by the grace of God even this most difficult thing becomes easy to accomplish if we want to do it.

Gandhi:  The deepest human need is the need to love.

We are all searching for the hug of God, our ultimate true love.
      - Carole Stewart McDonnell

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

-        Columnist David Brooks, The New York Times, May 13, 2008

I was lying in bed one day, thinking about my death, wondering if I'd be conscious enough to talk to my children, what I'd want to leave to them; famous last words, as it were.

       The key word is trust. Trust everything that happens in life, even those experiences that cause pain, will serve to better you in the end. It's easy to lose the inner vision, the greater truths, in the face of tragedy. There really is no such thing as suffering simply for the sake of suffering. Along with developing a basic trust in the rhyme and reason of life itself, I advise you to trust your intuition. It is a far better guide in the long run than your intellect

      Next on my list is to learn what love is. It is complete and utter surrender. That's a big word, surrender. It doesn't mean letting people walk all over you, take advantage of you. It's when we surrender control, let go of our egos, that all the love in the world is there waiting for us. Love is not a game, it's a state of being.
       - Henry Miller, Reflections, edited by Twinka Thiebaud

Norman Cousins in the Foreword to Most Of All, They Taught Me Happiness a book by Robert Muller:

Philosophical excursions invariably come full circle to the conclusions promulgated by sages throughout recorded history--the conclusions that man cannot safely ignore the life force at the center of his being (by whatever name it is called), that the dignity of man has its inception in the individual, that man's security lies not in transforming nature but in transforming himself, and that it is impossible to talk about the necessary transformation without using the word "love." 
      Perhaps we should encourage more people to talk about sacredness without overwhelming its meaning with religiosity.

Does God have a set way of prayer, a way that he expects each of us to follow?  I doubt it.  I believe some people -- lots of people -- pray through the witness of their lives, through the work they do, the friendships they have, the love they offer and receive from people.  Since when are words the only acceptable form of prayer?    
- Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness. Day was a founder of The Catholic Worker

. . . learn what love is. It is complete and utter surrender. That’s a big word, surrender. It doesn’t mean letting people walk all over you, take advantage of you. It’s when we surrender control, let go of our egos, that all the love in the world is there waiting for us. Love is not a game, it’s a state of being.
- Henry Miller from What Doncha Know? about Henry Miller edited by Twinka Thiebaud

Love all the earth, every ray of God’s light, every grain of sand or blade of grass, every living thing. If you love the earth enough, you will know the divine mystery.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only what you are expecting to give — which is everything. What you will receive in return varies. But really has no connection with what you give. You give because you love and cannot help giving. If you are very lucky, you may get loved back. That is delicious, but it does not necessarily happen.
- Katharine Hepburn, Me: Stories Of My Life

“You don’t know, or maybe you do,” said Mr. Hal, a look of deep satisfaction with the coffee and with his thoughts on his face, “how wonderful a feeling it give you when you know somebody love you and that’s just the way it is. You can be a devil, and still that somebody love you. You can be weak, you can be strong; you can know a heap or nearly nothing. That kind of love, when you think about it, just seems like some kind of puzzle, and you can spend your whole lifetime trying to figure it out. If you puffed up with vanity, you can’t help but think that they is something you created yourself.

Or maybe it your money or your car. But there’s something. . . It’s like how you love a certain place. You just do that’s all. And if you are lucky, while you’re on this earth, you get to visit it. And the place ‘knows’ about your love. That was the love and still is the love between Lissie and me.”
- Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

We should take heed of the promptings of love and truth in your heart, for those are the leadings of God.
- George Fox, The Journal of George Fox. Fox was a founder of Quakerism.

The selections above are mostly from The Heron Dance Book Of Love & Gratitude

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.
    - Ralph Waldo Emerson

. . .

Under every deep,
A lower deep opens
Under every beauty
Every mystery
A love of life opens.
       - Roderick MacIver