Love

Krishna & Radha

There is no path greater than love. There is no law higher than love. There is no goal beyond love. God and love are identical.

(Meher Baba)

Prepared by Bill Petix

Krishna & Radha

Lord Krishna is the eighth and the most popular incarnation of Lord Vishnu. He was born in approximately 3200 BCE in Vrindavan, where he was brought up by the cowherd family of Yashoda and Nanda. His childhood playmates were gopas (cowherd boys) and gopis (cowherd girls), who were greatly devoted to him. Of all gopis, Radha loved Krishna the most. In the forests of Vrindavan, Krishna often played his flute and gopis danced with him in ecstasy. The Gopis represent the individual souls trapped in physical bodies. Radha symbolizes the individual soul that is awakened to the love of God and is absorbed in such love. The sound of Krishna's flute represents the call of the divine for the individual souls. The gopis' love for Krishna signifies the eternal bond between the individual soul and God. The dance of the gopis and Krishna signifies the union of the human and Divine, the dance of the souls. In the forest, the gopis dance with Krishna and are absorbed in their love for him. This illustrates that when an individual soul responds to the call of the Divine, the soul enjoys union with the Lord and becomes absorbed in the divine ecstasy.

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God is love, and our souls are also love, and it is through love alone that we can know God.

(Sant Kirpal Singh)

Love is the energizing elixir of the universe, the cause and effect of all harmonies.

(Rumi)

-2-

When we come to the last moment of this lifetime, and we look back across it,

the only thing that’s going to matter is “What was the quality of our love?”

(Richard Bach)

Come on sweetheart let’s adore one another before there is no more of you and me.

(Rumi)

-3-

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breath and height my soul can reach.

(Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

My arrow of love has arrived at the target. My soul is screaming in ecstasy.

Every fiber of my being is in love with You! (Rumi)

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If you love one person more than another this is not true love; it is an attachment created by desire.

To love all things equally is true love. (Saradamma)

I wish I could give you a taste of the burning fire of love. There is a fire blazing inside of me. If I cry about it, or if I don’t, the fire is at work,

night and day. (Rumi)

-5-

Love is the great solvent of all difficulties, all problems, all misunderstandings.

(White Eagle)

When you love you should not say, “God is in my heart,”

but rather, “I am in the heart of God.” (Kahlil Gibran)

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Take away love and our earth is a tomb. (Robert Browning)

If destiny comes to help you, love will come to meet you. A life without love isn’t a life.

(Rumi)

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As a mother even at the risk of her own life protects her only son, so let a man cultivate goodwill without measure among all beings.

Let him suffuse the whole world with thoughts of love, unmixed with any sense of difference or opposed interests.

(Gautama Buddha)

Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking

around outside your body. (Elizabeth Stone)

-8-

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

(Rainer Maria Rilke)

To be able to say how much you love is to love but little. (Petrarch)

-9-

Love cannot endure indifference. It needs to be wanted. Like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another’s heart,

or its flame burns low. (Henry W. Beecher)

They do not love who do not show their love. (William Shakespeare)

-10-

The heart is the thousand-stringed instrument. Our sadness and fear come from being out of tune with love.

(Hafiz)

When all the strings of my life will be tuned, then at every touch of yours will come out the music of love.

(Tagore)

-11-

Love makes burdens lighter, because you divide them. It makes joys more intense, because you share them. It makes you stronger, so that you can reach out

and become involved with life in ways you dared not risk alone.

(Arthur Gordon)

Love says, “I will, I will take care of you,” to everything that is near.

(Hafiz)

-12-

To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.

(Alphonse de Lamartine)

For love is victorious in attack, and invulnerable in defense. Heaven arms with love those who it would not see destroyed.

(Lao-tzu)

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God is love, and he that has learned to live in the spirit of love has learned to live and dwell in God.

(William Law)

The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it,

you will discover that for you the world is transformed. (J. Krishnamurti)

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Love, and do what thou will. (Saint Augustine)

To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.

(Heather Cortez)

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A mind might ponder its thoughts for ages and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach in a day.

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it puts out the little and kindles the great.

(Roger de Busy-Rabutin)

-16-

Start learning to love God by loving those whom you cannot love. The more you remember others with kindness and generosity, the more you forget yourself, and when you forget yourself

completely, you find God. (Meher Baba)

If I had to choose between loving you and breathing I would use my last breath to say “I love you”.

-17-

A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world:

Everyone you meet is a mirror. (Ken Keyes Jr.)

Love is the power of God that binds two souls

and makes them one; there is no power on earth that can dissolve that bond. (The Aquarian Gospel)

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He who comes to do good knocks at the gate; He who loves finds the gate open.

(Rabindranath Tagore)

By accident of fortune a man may rule the world for a time,

but by virtue of love he may rule the world forever. (Lao-tzu)

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Mutual love, the Crown of all our bliss. (John Milton)

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:

Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. (Kahlil Gibran)

-20-

Love that has nothing but beauty to keep it in good health, is short lived.

(Erasmus)

Love of body or skin is passion. Love of God is devotion.

It is pure love. It is love for love's sake. It is divine. (Swami Sivananda)

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He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.

(Jesus Christ)

If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar;

for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.

(Jesus Christ)

-22-

There is in the human will an innate tendency, an inborn capacity for disinterested love.

This power to love another for his own sake is one of the things that makes us like God.

(Thomas Merton)

Where love is, no disguise can hide it for long; Where it is not, none can simulate it.

(La Rochefoucauld)

-23-

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

(Robert Heinlein)

God wants to see more love and playfulness in your eyes for that is your greatest witness to Him.

(Hafiz)

-24-

My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep; The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.

(William Shakespeare)

There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved. (George Sand)

-25-

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

(Lao tzu)

Love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love

will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith

is also of little love. (Erich Fromm)

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Because of Your love I have broken with my past. (Rumi)

It is possible that a man can be so changed by love as hardly to be recognized as the same person.

(Terence)

-27-

If I know what love is, it is because of you. (Herman Hesse)

Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.

(Saint Augustine)

-28-

We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread,

but there are many more dying for a little love. (Mother Teresa)

You come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by seeing an imperfect person perfectly.

(Sam Keen)

-29-

Love is the expression of an ancient need, that human desire was originally one and whole and the desire

and the pursuit of the whole is called love. (Aristophanes)

Love possesses seven hundred wings, and each one extends from the highest heaven to the lowest earth.

(Rumi)

-30-

The absolute value of love makes life worth while, and so makes Man’s strange and difficult situation acceptable.

Love cannot save life from death; but it can fulfill life’s purpose. (Arnold Toynbee)

The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.

(W. Somerset Maugham)

-31-

We can perhaps learn to prepare for love. We can welcome its coming, we can learn to treasure and cherish it when it comes,

but we cannot make it happen. We are elected into love. (Irene Claremone de Castillejo)

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder

where you are when you don’t come home at night. (Margaret Mead)

-32-

I may have the gift of inspired preaching; I may have all knowledge and understand all secrets; I may have all the faith needed to move mountains -

but if I have no love, I am nothing. (Saint Paul)

I may be able to speak the language of men and even of angels, but if I have no love, my speech is no more than a noisy gong

or a clanging bell. (Saint Paul)

-33-

If you would be loved, love and be lovable. (Benjamin Franklin)

Born at the banquet of the gods, love has of necessity been eternally in existence,

for it springs from the intention of the Soul towards its best, towards the Good; and as long as the Soul has been -

love has been. (Plotinus)

-34-

Does my behavior in respect of love affect nothing? That is because there is not enough love in me.

(Albert Schweitzer)

Love has the greatest power, and is the source of all our happiness and harmony, and makes us friends with the gods

who are above us, and with one another. (Plato)

-35-

Love’s gift cannot be given, it waits to be accepted. (Rabindranath Tagore)

Time is a factory where everyone slaves away, earning enough love to break their own chains.

(Hafiz)

-36-

The conclusion is always the same: Love is the most powerful and still the most

unknown energy of the world. (Teilhard de Chardin)

We will do many things for those whom we love

which we would not ordinarily do - which we would not ordinarily have the strength of mind and power to do.

How many habits have we been able to break through love, which we would never have had the strength to break

without love? (Meher Baba)

-37-

When we are not in love too much, we are not in love enough. (Bussy Rabutin)

Our desire for God is fanned by His love:

It is His attraction that draws all wayfarers along the path. Does dust rise up without a wind? Does a ship float

without the sea? (Rumi)

-38-

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof,

the work for which all other work is but preparation. (Rainer Maria Rilke)

I wish I could give you a taste of the burning fire of love. There is a fire blazing inside of me. If I cry about it, or if I don’t,

the fire is at work, night and day. (Rumi)

-39-

Love is something like the clouds that were in the sky before the sun came out. You cannot touch the clouds, you know; but you feel the rain and know how glad the flowers and the thirsty earth are to have it after a hot day. You cannot touch love either; but you feel the sweetness that it pours into everything.

(Annie Sullivan)

One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: that word is love.

(Sophocles)

-40-

Love talked about can be easily turned aside, but love demonstrated is irresistible.

(W. Stanley Mooneyham)

A life without love, without the presence of the beloved, is nothing but a mere magic-lantern show. We draw out slide after

slide, swiftly tiring of each, and pushing it back to make haste for the next.

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

The Meaning of Love

Those four letters, L-O-V-E, contain multitudes. The Ancient Greeks used three different words in place of our

catch-all one: Agape, the love that people have for God, duty, or family; Philia, which denoted the love we feel for friends;

and Eros, love for a lover.

Kirpalct@yahoo.com