"If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philosophical importance. The negative ideal of unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of love." - C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory

"He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Aids to Reflection: Moral and Religious Aphorisms

"Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it. Bitterness paralyzes life; love empowers it. Bitterness sickens life; love heals it. Bitterness blinds life; love anoints its eyes." - Harry Emerson Fosdick in Riverside Sermons, Christianity Today: February 9, 1998

"I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no more hurt, but only more love." - Mother Teresa

"It is a small step from looking down on others to looking up to oneself." - P. J. O'Rourke in the Weekly Standard

"The test of love is in how one relates not to saints and scholars but to rascals." - Abraham Joshua Heschel in A Passion for Truth

"Simply put, the stability of marriage is a by-product of an iron-willed determination to make it work." - James Dobson

"The pain of love is stronger than the pain of legalism." - Scotty Smith

"Without love, almsgiving is no more important an action than brushing your hair or washing your hands, and the Pharisees had just as elaborate a ritual for those things as they had for alms, too, because all these things were prescribed by law, and had to be done so. But love does not give money, it gives itself. If it gives itself first and a lot of money too, that is all the better. But first it must sacrifice itself." - Thomas Merton in Run to the Mountain: The Journals of Thomas Merton, Vol. 1, 1939-41

"Disturbers are to be rebuked, the low-spirited to be encouraged, the infirm to be supported, objectors confuted, the treacherous guarded against, the unskilled taught, the lazy aroused, the contentious restrained, the haughty repressed, litigants pacified, the poor relieved, the oppressed liberated, the good approved, the evil borne with, and all are to be loved." - Augustine

Love