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Agape Quotes

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Agape Love

Agape Quotes

“[On what young husbands should say to their wives:] I have taken you in my arms, and I love you, and I prefer you to my life itself. For the present life is nothing, and my most ardent dream is to spend it with you in such a way that we may be assured of not being separated in the life reserved for us... I place your love above all things, and nothing would be more bitter or painful to me than to be of a different mind than you.”

LoveLifeInspirationalPhilosophyGodWisdomRomanceRelationshipsMarriageWifeHusbandAgape
Author:John Chrysostom
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“Just as the Triune God lives as an endless momentum of attraction and joy, so God makes himself available not as an object for dispassionate scrutiny but through an overture of enticement, through which by the Spirit's agency we are made to long for God's presence, indeed, thirst for God. God "attracts our attention" by the outgoing Spirit, enabling us to respond, catching us up into the divine life. Indeed, can we not say that to experience the allure of God is nothing other than to experience the Spirit reconciling us to the Father through the Son and thus reordering our desires? No wedge need be driven between agape and eros provided the latter is not allowed to introduce notions of subsuming the "other" under manipulative restraint; indeed, as David Bentley Hart puts it, God's love, and hence the love with which we come to love God, is "eros and agape at once: a desire for the other that delights in the distance of otherness." As far as created beauty is concerned, beauty in the world that glorifies this God will also evoke desire--a yearning to explore and take pleasure in whatever is beautiful. There need be no shame in this provided our delight is delight in the other as other, and as long as we regularly recall that our love for God is the cantus firmus that enables all other desires to flourish.”

DesireBeautyErosAgape
Book:A Peculiar Orthodoxy: Reflections on Theology and the Arts
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“Every action is a losing, a letting go, a passing away from oneself of some bit of one’s own reality into the existence of others and of the world. In Jesus Christ, this character of action is not resisted, by trying to use our action to assert ourselves, extend ourselves, to impose our will and being upon situations. In Jesus Christ, this self-expending character of action is joyfully affirmed. I receive myself constantly from God’s Parenting love. But so far as some aspects of myself are at my disposal, these I receive to give away. Those who would live as Jesus did—who would act and purpose themselves as Jesus did—mean to love, i.e., they mean to expend themselves for others unto death. Their being is meant to pass away from them to others, and they make that meaning the conscious direction of their existence. Too often the love which is proclaimed in the churches suppresses this element of loss and need and death in activity. As a Christian, I often speak of love as helping others, but I ignore what this does to the person who loves. I ignore the fact that love is self-expenditure, a real expending and losing and deterioration of the self. I speak of love as if the person loving had no problems, no needs, no limits. In other words, I speak of love as if the affluent dream were true. This kind of proclamation is heard everywhere. We hear it said: 'Since you have no unanswered needs, why don’t you go out and help those other people who are in need?' But we never hear people go on and add: 'If you do this, you too will be driven into need.' And by not stating this conclusion, people give the childish impression that Christian love is some kind of cornucopia, where we can reach to everybody’s needs and problems and still have everything we need for ourselves. Believe me, there are grown-up persons who speak this kind of nonsense. And when people try to live out this illusory love, they become terrified when the self-expending begins to take its toll. Terror of relationship is [that] we eat each other. But note this very carefully: like Jesus, we too can only live to give our received selves away freely because we know our being is not thereby ended, but still and always lies in the Parenting of our God.... Those who love in the name of Jesus Christ... serve the needs of others willingly, even to the point of being exposed in their own neediness.... They do not cope with their own needs. They do not anguish over how their own needs may be met by the twists and turns of their circumstances, by the whims of their society, or by the strategies of their own egos. At the center of their life—the very innermost center—they are grateful to God, because... they do not fear neediness. That is what frees them to serve the needy, to companion the needy, to become and be one of the needy.”

LoveActionPassionJesusChristNeedSelflessnessCrucifixionAgapeNeediness
Book:Dying Unto Life
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“In the final analysis, agape means a recognition of the fact that all life is interrelated. All humanity is involved in a single process, and all men are brothers. To the degree that I harm my brother, no matter what he is doing to me, to that extent I am harming myself. For example, white men often refuse federal aid to education in order to avoid giving the Negro his rights; but because all men are brothers they cannot deny Negro children without harming their own. They end, all efforts to the contrary, by hurting themselves. Why is this? Because men are brothers. If you harm me, you harm yourself. Love, agape, is the only cement that can hold this broken community together. When I am commanded to love, I am commanded to restore community, to resist injustice, and to meet the needs of my brothers.”

LoveHumanityUnderstandingCommunityJusticeBrotherhoodGood WillAgapeMutualityInterrelatedness
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“They'll say you are bad or perhaps you are mad or at least you should stay undercover. Your mind must be bare if you would dare to think you can love more than one lover.”

BelieveRealFeelingsWisdomDreamTruthPainHappinessDesireTimeSufferingHumanityLostFearPeaceFriendshipHurtFreedomFamilyGoneForeverRelationshipTroubleTeamShareFeminismCryHonestySweetCommunicationBrokenFriendsLoversSorrowSadHeartbreakHumanRespectCommitmentRomanticUnityValueDivorceBetrayalPartnersJealousyDirtyEmpoweringControlLiveCheatingNeedCheatNastyInfidelityConsentSpouseValentineWishesSharingHeartbrokenDivorcedBreak UpQueerEndJerkHeartsKeepersDepressedUnicornPolygamyHornyUnfaithfulMonogamyErosStayPossessiveCheaterKeepUndercoverAgapePolyamoryThreesomeYoloValentinesSpiceSlutClosetTriadKeeperPolygynyEndedSlutsSwingingPluralNonmonogamySweetheartsPolyandryPolyculeQuad
Author:David Rovics
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“A mother's heart is a vast and glorious thing. My mother's heart was expansive, having been enlarged by suffering and years of clinging to Jesus while being misunderstood, dismissed, and judged by those she loved most. Me included. It had cost her to love, had cost her much to mother. It always does. But she would tell you that it's worth it, that there is no other way.”

LoveTruthAgape
Book:Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman's Soul
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“There is a word from the time of the cathedrals: agape, an expression of intense spiritual affinity with the mystery that is "to be sharing life with other life." Agape is love, and it can mean "the love of another for the sake of God." More broadly and essentially, it is a humble, impassioned embrace of something outside the self, in the name of that which we refer to as God, but which also includes the self and is God. We are clearly indebted as a species to the play of our intelligence; we trust our future to it; but we do not know whether intelligence is reason or whether intelligence is this desire to embrace and be embraced in the pattern that both theologians and physicists call God. Whether intelligence, in other words, is love.”

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Book:Arctic Dreams
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“Holistic, unconditional love, agape, is the unity in which duality disappears. It is as if a certain internal boundary has vanished. With agape what we love is ourselves, the way a mother loves her child as herself. This is the meaning of loving another as yourself – transcending our phenomenal borders and experiencing ourselves in another and the other in, not apart from, us. Eventually, if love is comprehensive, it unites us with everything and allows us to know that we are everything. Therefore, how can we support the illusion of this isolated, separate self that is threatened by and defends itself from everything outside? Love returns us to the unity that is actually Reality. Reality is not the isolation, suspicion, envy, selfishness, and fear of loss that we have come to accept as normal; it is that we are all part of one Life. The same Spirit moves in us all. You come to know this better when you realize that we all have the same kinds of feelings, the same wish to be known and respected, to share ourselves and let down our defenses. We are continually faced with a choice between personal achievement, personal security, and comfort on the one hand, and working for the whole and helping everyone and everything toward perfection on the other. We are faced with a choice between looking out for ourselves and contributing wholeheartedly to a common good. We are faced with focusing on self-love or increasing our love of all Life. (p. 191)”

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Book:Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self
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“Agape is not a weak, passive love. It is love in action. Agape is love seeking to preserve and create community. It is insistence on community even when one seeks to break it. Agape is a willingness to sacrifice in the interest of mutuality. Agape is a willingness to go to any length to restore community. It doesn't stop at the first mile, but it goes the second mile to restore community. It is a willingness to forgive, not seven times, but seventy times seven to restore community.”

LoveUnderstandingCommunityGood WillAgapeMutualitySacrificingGood Will Toward Men
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“HE remembered looking "agape" in his encyclopedia volume after he read Dr. King's speech in the DEFENDER. The newspaper ran the address in full after the reverend's appearance at Cornell College. If Elwood had come across the word before, through all those years of skipping around the book, it hadn't stuck in his head. King described "agape" as a divine love operating in the heart of man. A selfless love, an incandescent love, the highest there is. He called upon his Negro audience to cultivate that pure love for their oppressors, that it might carry them to the other side of the struggle. Elwood tried to get his head around it, now that it was no longer the abstraction floating in his head last spring. It was real now. "Throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities after midnight hours, and drag us out onto some wayside road, and beat us and leave us half-dead, and we will still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. The capacity to suffer. Elwood--all the Nickel boys--existed in the capacity. Breathed in it, ate in it, dreamed in it. That was their lives now. Otherwise they would have perished. The beatings, the rapes, the unrelenting winnowing of themselves. They endured. But to love those who destroyed them? To make that leap? "We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you." Elwood shook his head. What a thing to ask. What an impossible thing.”

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Book:The Nickel Boys
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“Agape is disinterested love. It is a love in which the individual seeks not his own good, but the good of his neighbor (I Cor. 10:24). Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people, or any qualities people possess. It begins by loving others for their sakes. It is an entirely "neighbor-regarding concern for others," which discovers the neighbor in every man it meets. Therefore agape makes no distinction between friend and enemy; it is directed toward both.”

LoveUnderstandingConcernNonviolenceGood WillNeighborsAgapeGood Will Toward Men
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“When we devote heart, soul, mind, and strength to loving him, we perceive ourselves rightly - no room for pride or self-exaltation - which prepares us to love our neighbour freely. Rightly perceiving ourselves to be unworthy recipients of the agape of God, we become willing to love our neighbour in spite of himself because God first loved us in spite of ourselves. We do not wait to feel love; rather, we will ourselves to act in love whether we feel it or not. Agape transcends our feelings.”

LoveAgapeGreat Commandment
Book:In His Image: 10 Ways God Calls Us to Reflect His Character
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“But blessing and protecting someone because they abide by your rules or love you back isn’t agape love. It’s merely insurance protecting our own investments. And Jesus said even the pagans know how to do that. When it comes to the foundational way Jesus called us to follow through, we don’t get a safety net. Love costs us. And sometimes the cost of love is pain, grief, and heartbreak. Love means laying down our lives:”

LoveJesusUnconditional LoveAgapeThe Kingdom Of Heaven
Book:En(d)titlement: Trade a Culture of Shame for a Life Marked by Grace
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“The first three years of our marriage were miserable. Until I got a divorce. A divorce from loving myself and seeking my own way. I was reading the book of Galatians one night when I stumbled on the verse, "I no longer live, but Christ lives in me" (2:20), and the most profound thought hit me: If I am dead, and Christ lives in me, can my wife see Him there? Finding the right person, I have since discovered, is less important than being the right person. The happiest married people I know discovered early on that the "better" comes after the "worse".”

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Book:Family Squeeze: Tales of Hope and Hilarity for a Sandwiched Generation
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“Romantic love is a fairly recent social behavior. Over the course of human history, this approach accounts for very little of humanity’s time here. Yet, in the unconscious and in fairy tales the mythology of love says we can find the perfect mate, someone who unconditionally loves your smells, has a magical connection to you, will live forever, and will raise a family with you. This is part of the relationship neuroses of the modern world. It is based on people not understanding what love is.”

LoveRomanceRelationshipsMarriageFalling In LoveRomantic LoveAgape
Book:Into the Haunted Ground: A Guide to Cutting the Root of Suffering
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“Agape is disinterested love. . . . Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people, or any qualities people possess. It begins by loving others for their sakes. . . . Therefore, agape makes no distinction between friend and enemy; it is directed toward both.”

PeopleDoeFaithQualityEnemySakeWorthyDistinctionUnworthyDisinterestedLoving OthersFriends And EnemiesAgapeDisinterested Love
Book:A Martin Luther King Treasury
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“Divine love, agape, is self-sacrificing love, which sounds difficult, as it is, and not very attractive. If the best image we have of love is of a man who's been tortured and hung upon a cross to die an excruciating death, this is something that human beings find very, very hard to understand as love. But it is the highest Christian image of love.”

IfsMenHumansSelfHardChristianDiesDifficultSoundHuman BeingsLove IsSacrificeDivineHighestCrossesAttractiveHungDivine LoveAgapeImages Of Love
Author:Kevin Hart
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“The Greeks were smarter than us, and they had different words for different kinds of love. There's storge, which is family love. That's not us. There's eros, which is sexual love. There's philia, which is brotherly love. And then there's the highest form. Agape.” He pronounced it “aga-pay.” “That's transcendental love, like when you place the other person above yourself.”

KindPersonsDifferentFormPayHighestGreekDifferent KindsSmarterFamily LoveTranscendentalKinds Of LoveErosBrotherlyBrotherly LoveAgapeDifferent Kinds Of Love
Book:Openly Straight
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“To us, to the everyday teachers of everyday students, neither of whom is writing the book of the universe but who both have their fullest life only when they align themselves with its truths, working out our own commitment to and our own vision of agape, in however homely or personal a form, is a life long task that both guides us in our teaching endeavors and honors those endeavors at the same time.”

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Author:Marshall Gregory
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“My teenage children watched Senator Clinton on the Today Show, mouths agape. They attended our local caucus with me and saw hundreds of our friends and neighbors gathered in the elementary school gym on that Sunday afternoon, despite an ugly Maine snowstorm. They listened to the thoughtful searching debates and saw us cast our votes. How could anyone suggest we didn't know exactly what we were doing? 'What's the point of electing someone who doesn't believe in the American people?' they asked. 'If she wants to ignore us now when she's only a candidate, what will she do as the President?'”

PeopleIfsKnowsWantBelieveChildrenShowsTodaySchoolPresidentSawsMouthsVoteClintonCastsUglyNeighborDebateLocalsDespiteCandidatesThoughtfulSundayGymAfternoonSenatorsTeenageElementary SchoolMaineCaucusAgapeSunday AfternoonsSnowstorms
Author:Shoshana Zuboff
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“What I am trying to say is that it is not without any value. The value of copies is that they can direct us towards the original. I was recently at the Louvre Museum and I was filming people who were viewing the Mona Lisa. I noticed the number of ordinary people, astonished, mouths agape, standing still for long stretches looking at the work, and I wondered, "Where does this come from? Are these people all art connoisseurs?" They are like me; through the years, we've seen this work in our schoolbooks or art history books, but when we stand before the original, we hold our breath.”

PeopleTryingYearsLongDoeArtStillsBookValuesNumbersOrdinaryMouthsStandingDirectBreathsOriginalsLike MeCopiesMuseumsOrdinary PeopleThrough The YearsArt HistoryHistory BooksStanding StillMona LisaConnoisseurAgapeLouvre
Author:Abbas Kiarostami
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“There's a term, agape, you hear used a lot with charismatic religious groups, that it's this more pure love of caring, of sharing of concern and understanding. I think players and teams have to come to that at some point in the season to become successful. Maybe not "personal friends," but they become teammates at the highest level of that term.”

ThinkingUnderstandingTermReligiousSuccessfulPlayerTeamConcernCaringTeammatePure LoveCharismaticBecoming SuccessfulAgape
Author:Phil Jackson
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