Love is the key. If we start to express the spring of love within that is our true essence, our Truth, our spark of Divinity... and allow it to flow more... then all is revealed. Love becomes our guide in life, our connection with All, and our path back to Source.

Peter Shepherd

There is no difficulty that enough LOVE will not conquer, no disease that enough LOVE will not heal, no door that enough LOVE will not open, no gulf that enough LOVE will not bridge, no wall that enough LOVE will not throw down, no sin that enough LOVE will not redeem...

Emmet Fox

To love yourself right now, just as you are, is to give yourself heaven. Don’t wait until you die. If you wait, you die now. If you love, you live now.

Alan Cohen

When love is your highest priority,

 your heart opens and you will connect with Spirit.

Dr. Margaret Paul

True Love must have free flow.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

When Love comes suddenly and taps

on your window, run and let it in, but first

shut the door of your reason,

even the smallest hint chases love away,

like smoke that drowns the freshness

of the morning breeze.

To reason, Love can only say

the way is barred, you can’t pass through,

but to the lover it offers a hundred blessings.

Before the mind decides to take a step,

Love has reached the seventh heaven.

Love has climbed the Holy Mountain.

I must stop this talk now and let

Love speak from its nest of silence.

Rumi

Seize the moments of happiness, 

love and be loved!

That is the only reality in the world,

all else is folly.

Leo Tolstoy

Love is not in others, but in ourselves. But to awaken it we need another person.

Paulo Coelho

I want to taste and glory in each day, 

and never be afraid to experience pain;

and never shut myself up

in a numb core of nonfeeling, 

or stop questioning and criticizing life and

take the easy way out. 

To learn and think: to think and live;

to live and learn: this always,

with new insight, new understanding,

and new love.

Sylvia Plath

It is only by loving yourself that your heart opens for others.

Sunnydreams

Love should be a reality in your life, not just a poem, not just a dream. It has to be actualized. It is never too late to experience love for the first time. Learn to love. Very few people know how to love. They all know that love is needed, they all know that without love life is meaningless, but they don’t know how to love.

Osho

The amount of happiness that you have depends on the amount of freedom you have in your heart.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Love is not giving up your story to become someone else's.

 It is coexistence of two stories.

Sunnydreams

This heart is not

a summer field

and yet...

how dense love's foliage

has grown.

Izumi Shikibu

Come

Come

let's fall

in love

again

let's turn

all the dirt

in this world

to shiny gold.

Come

let's be

a new spring

a love reborn.

Find our aroma

from the essence

of all who

emit heavenly fragrance.

Like a fresh tree

bloom and spread

all the blessings

right from inside.

Rumi

There is a magnet in your heart that will attract true friends. 

That magnet is unselfishness, thinking of others first;

when you learn to live for others, they will live for you. 

Paramahansa Yogananda

To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.

Bell Hooks

The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. 

The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others.

When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving we willingly hear the other’s truth, and most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.

Bell Hooks

A person who asks love of others, but does not himself give it, cannot be loved. Always be the first to give love and it shall be given to you. As long as you do not give your heart first, you will be far from love.

Peter Deunov (Beinsa Duno)

If we love, our hearts and souls receive wings, it blooms a summery happiness in us. We are walking like on a soft carpet of moss, and it seems like all doors are open. From our smile, we built bridges and our heart is sleeping under the open sky. We are entirely without fear. It rains dreams, and on the trees are growing more and more…. miracles.

Rumi

We should really love each other in peace and harmony. Instead we're fussin' and fighting like we ain't supposed to be.

Bob Marley

When it's over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

Mary Oliver  

Love heals all Pain

Bitter is made sweet through love; 

Copper becomes gold through love. 

Through love dregs become clear; 

love heals all pain. 

Through love the king becomes slave; 

love brings the dead to life.

Rumi

The heart is your student for love is the only way we learn.

Rumi

It is love that brings happiness to people. 

It is love that gives joy to happiness. 

My mother didn't give birth to me, that love did. 

A hundred blessings and praises to that love.

Rumi

Love Is Longing

Love is longing and longing, the pain of being parted;

No illness is rich enough for the distress of the heart.

A lover’s lament surpasses all other cries of pain,

Love is the royal threshold to God’s mystery.

The carnival of small affections and polite attachments

Which litter and consume our passing time

Is no match to Love which pulses behind this play.

To live Love is to be seized by joy and bewilderment;

Love is not clear-minded, busy with images and argument.

Language is too precocious, too impudent, too sane

To stop the molten lava of Love churning the blood.

Love is dangerous, offering no consolation;

Only those who are ravaged by Love know Love.

The sun alone unveils the sun to those who have

The sense to receive the senseless and not turn away.

Cavernous shadows need the light to play

But light and light alone can lead you

To the light alone.

Our daily sun is but a working star in a galaxy of stars,

But our inner sun is One,

The dancing nuance of eternal light.

You must be set alight by the inner sun,

You have to live your Love or else

You’ll only end in words.

Rumi

How the words 'love', 'harmony' and 'beauty' delight the heart of everyone who hears them! One may wonder what it can be in these words that is able to exert such a natural power upon the human soul. Because they are the very nature of life. Love is the nature of life, beauty is the outcome of life, harmony is the means by which life accomplishes its purpose, and the lack of it results in destruction.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

Premjeet/Victory of love

Love has a way of its own

it becomes victorious but in a very strange way

without conquering, without fighting

in fact even without desiring to be victorious

victory comes as a gift

as a reward from the beyond

love is ready to be defeated

love enjoys to be defeated

love is ready to surrender

love is never willing to fight

but this is one of the miracles of life

that love surrenders, but in that very surrender

becomes victorious

without any desire, without any motive

victory comes on its own accord

the people who try to be victorious

are never victorious

they can force others into submission, into slavery

but they cannot win their hearts - that’s impossible

the body can be made a slave

it can be chained, imprisoned, killed, destroyed

but you cannot imprison the heart

and the heart is the real core of the person

love without any effort to conquer

reaches to the very core of the person

it is the only victory there is

all alexander the greats are failures

utter failures

only lovers have known the taste of victory

and it depends on us

if we want to remain beggars

go on struggling, fighting

if one wants to be the emperor

then surrender to existence, relax with existence

be in a state of loving let-go and suddenly

all is yours, the whole kingdom of God is yours

Osho

The real object of our love is not outside of us, the real object of our love is ourselves. We have to know how to love ourselves, know how to return to our true nature, to see the wholesome, the good, the true and the beautiful within us. Then we will be able to see that in others.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Love is not a thing to understand.

Love is not a thing to feel.

Love is not a thing to give and receive.

Love is a thing only to become

And eternally be.

Sri Chinmoy

There are three lessons I would write

Three words, as with a burning pen, 

In tracings of eternal light,

Upon the heart of men.

Have hope! though clouds environ round,

And gladness hides her face in scorn,

Put thou the shadow from thy brow,

No night but hath its morn.

Have love! not love alone for one, 

But man as man thy brother call,

And scatter like the circling sun,

Thy charities on all.

Friedrich Schiller

I am in Love with Love 

and Love is in Love with me.

My body is in love with my soul

and the soul is in love with my body.

I opened my arms to Love

and Love embraced me

like a lover.

Rumi

Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?

Rumi

The gardens may flow with beauty,

But let us go to the Gardener himself.

Rumi

Lift the veil that obscures the heart

and there you will find 

what you are looking for.

Kabir

We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement.

Hermann Hesse

Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. 

I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.

Hermann Hesse

My Heart is Open to All Winds

My heart is open to all winds

It is a pasture for gazelles

And a home for Christian monks,

A temple for idols

The Black Stone of the Mecca pilgrim,

The table of the Torah

And the book of the Koran.

Wherever God's caravans turn, 

The religion of love shall be my religion

And my faith.

Muhammad Ibn 'Arabi

Love is about longing those you miss.

Love is about treating loved ones with love.

Love is to give to others if they are wanting.

Loving people live in a loving world,

so they treat each other with love.

And because the people of the world 

treat each other with love,

the dark clouds of anger are lifted,

and they care for one another.

At the sight of the world 

and all of its creations living on love,

I jump for joy;

no one in the world has been left behind.

The world has always been a place where 

there is no distinction between ‘you’ and ‘me,’

and such a world is indeed a great place to live in.

Woo Myung

Love is your truest essence and the more you can get in touch with it, the better your life will become and the greater level of healing you will experience. Because all healing is, in itself, a return to love and an acceptance of love in its purest form. And, in fact, it is only our stray from love that causes illness, be it mental, emotional or physical. Love is the solution to all of our problems and the lack of love is the cause of them.

Robert Kopecky

"The soul feels suffocated when the doors of the heart are closed." Hazrat Inayat Khan

Commentary by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan:

There is a door to man's heart; it is either closed or open. When he holds a thing and says, 'This is mine,' he closes the door to his heart; but when he shares his goods with others and says, 'This is yours as well as mine,' this opens his heart. We must learn consideration for others; it does not matter whether they are rich or poor. We may have only one slice of bread, but when there is another sitting by our side we share that slice with him. By doing this, even if our bodily appetite remains unsatisfied, our heart is filled with joy to think that we shared our happiness with another. It is this spirit which is necessary just now to change the condition of the world, not political and commercial disputes. We must be awakened to the main truth, that the happiness and peace of each can only be the happiness and peace of all.

People pursue spirituality with their brain: that is where they are mistaken. Spirituality is attained through the heart. What do I mean by the heart? Is it the nervous center in the midst of the breast, the small piece of flesh that doctors call the heart? No, the definition of the heart is that it is the depth of the mind, the mind being the surface of the heart. That in us which feels is the heart, that which thinks is the mind. It is the same thing which thinks and feels, but the direction is different: feeling comes from the depth, thought from the surface. ... The Sufis have therefore considered the development of the heart quality as a spiritual culture, and have called it the culture of the heart. It consists of the tuning of the heart.

Tuning means changing the pitch of the vibrations. Tuning the heart means changing the vibrations, bringing them to a certain pitch which is the natural one where you feel the joy and ecstasy of life, which enables you to give pleasure to others even by your presence because you are tuned. When an instrument is properly tuned you need not play music on it; just by striking it you will feel a great magnetism coming from it. If an instrument well-tuned can have that magnetism, how much greater should be the magnetism of hearts that are tuned. Rumi says, 'Whether you have loved a human being or whether you have loved God, if you have loved enough you will be brought in the end into the presence of the supreme Love itself'.

So many gods, so many creeds,

So many paths that wind and wind,

While just the art of being kind

Is all the sad world needs.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

This is how we change the world: hug a terrorist! This'll make you cry - did me anyway: http://www.davidicke.com/headlines/hug-a-terrorist/

Song of Peace

Just listen to the music in your heart,

and the world will never forget it.

That music is the heartbeat of others.

Just listen.

Philip Claude Andermann

Behind a blood-stained curtain, love has spread its gardens.

Lovers are busy with the beauty of the love that is beyond explanation.

Intellect says: 'The six directions are the limit, there is nothing beyond them.'

Love says:'There is a road, and I have journeyed on it many times.'

Love detected markets beyond that market.

Intellect says:'Do not set foot on the land of annihilation;

There is nothing there but thorns.'

Love says;'Those thorns you feel are only inside you!

Be silent! remove the thorn of existence from the foot of the heart;

So that you may see the gardens within.'

O Shams of Tabriz! You are the Sun cloaked by the cloud of speech;

When your Sun rose, all the words melted!

Rumi_Divan 132:1-3, 6-8