Rumi Quotes

Swords don't glorify the creator-God. Love does. Self-giving love, best of all.

Sacrifice is the essence of love, which is the essence of God.

I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn't touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.

You know it's love when all you want is that person to be happy, even if you're not part of their happiness.

The exercise of benevolence is joy to loving hearts: the more pain it costs, the more joy it is. Kind actions make us happy, and in such joy we find communion with the great heart of Jesus.

Love, it has been said, flows downward. The love of parents for their children has always been far more powerful than that of children for their parents; and who among the sons of men ever loved God with a thousandth part of the love which God has manifested to us?

Love is always being given where it is not required.

Let us live no more to ourselves, but to Him who loved us, and gave Himself to die for us.

If my love is without sacrifice, it is selfish. Such a love is barter, for there is exchange of love and devotion in return for something. It is conditional love.

Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.

God is stronger than their strength, more loving than their uttermost love, and in so far as they have loved and sacrificed themselves for others, they have obtained the infallible proof, that God too lives and loves and gives Himself away.

Love consists in giving without getting in return; in giving what is not owed, what is not due the other. That's why true love is never based, as associations for utility or pleasure are, on a fair exchange.

Oh may He look on us with love and pity and then we shall be able to do anything He wishes us to do, no matter how difficult to accomplish or painful to our feeling.

My brothers and sisters, true love is a reflection of the Savior's love. In December of each year we call it the Christmas spirit. You can hear it. You can see it. You can feel it.

When you really see how much God loves you, there's no greater love than that, and I had to match that amount of love He had for me, which is the reason why I decided to take a vow of celibacy.

I must consider myself as the man of the cross and love the one that God gives me without thinking any further.

You must act in your friends' interests whether it pleases them or not; the object of love is to serve, not to win.

She better liked to see him free and happy, even than to have him near her, because she loved him better than herself.

If we really want to love, if we really want to live, we must love until it hurts . . . No Rotarian whose motto is Service Above Self, I think, should call himself a Rotarian if he does not make time to serve . . . If we love, we begin to serve

The Saint finds her true reason for living in unconditional love and in her ability to give without asking anything in return.

That is love, to give away everything, to sacrifice everything, without the slightest desire to get anything in return.3

If we give what we treasure most to a Being we love with all our hearts, if we can do that without expecting anything in return, then the world becomes a beautiful place.

So the divine love is sacrificial love. Love does not mean to have and to own and to possess. It means to be had and to be owned and to be possessed. It is not a circle circumscribed by self, it is arms outstretched to embrace all humanity within its grasp.

Love is strong as death; but nothing else is as strong as either; and both, love and death, met in Christ. How strong and powerful upon you, then, should that instruction be, that comes to you from both these, the love and death of Jesus Christ!

In a nutshell, loving someone is about giving, not receiving.