Today we’re celebrating LOVE and our opportunity to share it with others through reviewing some of my favorite quotes about what it means to love, to lose, to make mistakes, and to grow through loving.

Age does not protect you from love, but love to some extent protects you from age.
–Jeanne Moreau

Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.
–Sir Arthur Pinero

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
–Rumi

If you cannot love yourself, you have no chance to love another person.
–Matthew Ford

You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves.
–Saint Francis de Sales

We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.
–Goethe

I have found that if you love life, life will love you back.
–Arthur Rubenstein

One makes mistakes: that is life. But it is never quite a mistake to have loved.
–Romain Rolland

Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery

In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love you want the other person.
–Margaret Anderson

Love and kindness are never wasted. They always make a difference. They bless the one who receives them, and they bless you, the giver.
–Barbara De Angelis

The love we give away is the only love we keep.
–Elbert Hubbard

We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.
–Tom Robbins

If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
–Mother Teresa

He who has never experienced hurt, cannot experience true love.
–Tristan J. Loo

Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
–Ursula K. LeGuin

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
–Anais Nin

Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body's deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body's superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity.
–Henri Nouwen

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…
–Neil Gaiman

I love you. It's not a weight you must carry around. I love you. It's not a box that holds you in. I love you. It's not a standard you have to bear. I love you. It's not a sacrifice I make. I love you. It's not a pedestal you are frozen upon. I love you. It's not an expectation of perfection. I love you. It's not my life's whole purpose (or your's). I love you. It's not to make you change. I love you. It's not even to make you love me. I love you. It's as pure and simple as that.
–Anonymous