Snips

"Love brings with it the gift of freedom. Love teaches us to allow the person we love to do as he or she chooses. It teaches us to encourage the people we love to freely make their own choices, to seek their own path, to learn their way in their own time. Love that restrains isn't love. It's insecurity. We may tell others how we feel about something they do or don't do. We may make decisions as a reaction to others' choices. That is our right and our responsibility. But to restrain another in the name of love doesn't create love; it creates restraint." Melody Beattie

If you desire to align yourself with God's love, take an honest assessment of where love is lacking in your life. Do you embrace the difficult people in your family, work or neighborhood? Do you hold grudges or do you forgive those who betray you? The only way to keep in alignment is to practice choosing love, again and again, even when it's difficult.Mary Manin Morrissey

AA Thought for the Day / I looked around me at people who seemed happyand tried to analyze their happiness, and it seemed to me that without exception these people had something or somebody they loved very much. I didn't have the courage to love; I was not even sure I had the capacity. Fear of rejection and its ensuing pain were not to be risked... / c. AA, p. 546

When you know that you are not feeling loved, you naturally ask the question how can I feel loved right now? What you realize as you explore this important question is that the only way you can feel loved is to think a loving thought. Loving thoughts lead to the emotional state of feeling loved. And out of this positive emotional state actions arise which connect you to others. Now it doesn’t matter that this loving thought is about yourself or about someone else. Any loving thought will do. Love is completely unselfish and unselective. Whomever you love will do just fine. When you offer love to another person, you are also offering it to yourself.Paul Ferrini

"Let us make a pledge that, if not all day or all night long, at least for a few moments every day, we will make an effort to experience love, love that is free from selfishness, free from desire, free from expectation, love that is complete freedom." Swami Chidvilasananda

"None of us has the power to make someone else love us. But we all have the power to give away love, to love other people. And if we do so, we change the kind of person we are, and we change the kind of world we live in." Rabbi Harold Kushner

"One of the first things to do, is to love everybody ... with love, all things are possible ... and the one who has learned to love all people will find plenty of people who will return that love." Ernest Holmes

"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

"Look lovingly upon the present, for it holds the only things that are forever true." A Course in Miracles