Jan Karon Quotes

When it gets harder to love, love harder.

If we are to grow in love, the prisons of our egoism must be unlocked. This implies suffering, constant effort and repeated choices.

Tolerance is a cheap, low-grade parody of love. Tolerance is not a great virtue to aspire to. Love is much tougher and harder.

Love is doing something you don't want to do for someone you don't particularly like at that moment.

The thing which makes one man greater than another, the quality by which we ought to measure greatness, is a man's capacity for loving.

Learning unconditional love helped me have healthier relationships, including my current marriage.

Writing a book is like rearing children -- willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love.

Love is not a feeling to be felt, it's an action to be learned.

Love is an action, never simply a feeling.

There is no act of love that is not an act of work or courage. No exceptions.

If you want a long-term relationship that doesn't require a lot of work, I say, get a dog. They love you no matter what. But when it comes to humans, there's no secret; you really have to appreciate the person every single day.

I think love is a really hard thing to define. I think it's multifaceted.

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own... Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy.

We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love.

People confuse ego, lust, insecurity with true love.

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

You know, I think I'm a stronger person for realizing that you can't make everybody love you.

Love does not claim possession, but gives freedom.

The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.

There's that thing that if you want to have any kind of lasting love, I think you have to love the whole person and not just the parts of them that you choose.

My mother is not a model. She is not perfect. That awareness is part of learning to love someone. Predicting the actions of someone is an act of love. We persist, even when we get it wrong. That's the beauty of love.

A relationship succeeds when obstacles are met with communication and resolution. A relationship flourishes when we take the beloved as our teacher. Shared goals create a transformative, interwoven path.

If you've ever had anyone in your life who has been struggling with something, struggling with addiction or struggling with anything, and it's about the resilience of love and how much you're willing to struggle with somebody to preserve your relationship and to try to preserve them as a person.

As in all areas, we can improve how good we are at loving another person.