I am always violently in love with something — an idea, a person, a job.
      - Ansel Adams in a letter to Nancy Newhall, July 15, 1944

Artists tend to fall in love a lot. We’re sensitive and passionate. We love ideas. We’re easily influenced, easily thrown off track. When we talk to someone with an accent, within a short while we’ve started to emulate the same accent without realizing it. At least I do. I find I adopt the cadence of the people I tune into.

In another letter, this time to photographer Cedric Wright, Ansel Adams explored the role of love in creating works of art.

Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things. Children are not only flesh and blood -- children may be ideas, thoughts, emotions. The person of the one who is loved is a form composed of a myriad mirrors reflecting and illuminating the powers and the thoughts and the emotions that are within you, and flashing another kind of light from within. No words or deeds may encompass it.

Friendship is another form of love--more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptances of the things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean reality of granite.

Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of Things, it is more than kindness which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inner relations of these.
- Ansel Adams To Cedric Wright,  June 10, 1937.

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

 In some ways, it is easier to love a creative work than it is to love people. People are often unpredictable, indifferent or even hostile. Love of people requires forgiveness, acceptance and understanding. There are people in my life, from my past, whom I think of almost every day, who I should reach out to and forgive but don’t. Why? I don’t think they care. Indifference seems to hit me especially hard. I’d rather pour love into work than into indifference.

Lots of things have to be right in a person’s life in order to pour love into a work, or into a friendship, a partnership. Harmony with yourself, with your inner world. Strength to overcome feelings of vulnerability. To create a work of love day after day, year after year, requires consistency and discipline. It is essentially about gathering love, building it up into a big pool inside yourself and then focusing it in a laser-like way so that the outcome is work of love, of beauty.

God changes appearance every second. Blessed is the man who can recognize him in all his disguises. One moment he is a glass of fresh water, the next your son bouncing on your knees or an enchanting woman, or perhaps merely a morning walk.
- Nikos Kazantzakis, Report To Greco

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 from The Door to Joy

The object of our love should be made better in some way by that love. It is common and easy to express love in words. Love expressed in action is less common. Part of a balanced life, a full life, is expressing gratitude in some tangible way. It needs to cost you a little, I think. Sacrifice for the sacred. The giving up of unimportant things for important ones.