What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously.

We can’t expect to get love right when we’ve never been educated on how to give or receive it. How to manage our emotions in connection to someone else’s. How to understand others. How to build and nurture a relationship where both people thrive.

It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.

Of all the ways we have found to hurt ourselves, the worse has been through love. We are always suffering because of someone who doesn't love us, or someone who has left us, or someone who won't leave us. If we are alone, it is because no one wants us...

Love without knowledge is demonic.

Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged, healed, and rare.

To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.

All love is a weakness, if it comes to that, in so far as it destroys some part of our independence.

How sad, a heart that
does not know how to love, that
does not know what it is to be drunk with love.
If you are not in love, how can you enjoy
the blinding light of the sun,
the soft light of the moon?

No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.

Love is not knowing what you're talking about.

It is sad to love and be unloved, but sadder still to be unable to love.

To love is to lose control.

We cannot know love if we remain unable to surrender our attachment to power, if any feeling of vulnerability strikes terror in our hearts. Lovelessness torments.