Alan Cohen Quotes

If you love, you will suffer. The only way to protect yourself against suffering is to protect yourself against love - and that is the greatest suffering of all, loneliness.

You can't shut off the risk and the pain without losing the love that remains.

If we want the advantages of love, then we must be willing to take the risks of love. And that requires vulnerability. Of course, we can refuse this path and trod another one devoid of openness. But the toll on such a road is extremely high.

I'd rather bleed with cuts of love than live without any scars.

The primary nature of every human being is to be open to life and love. Being guarded, armoured, distrustful and enclosed is second nature in our culture. It is the means we adopt to protect ourselves against being hurt, but when such attitudes become characterological or structured in the personality, they constitute a more severe hurt and create a greater crippling than the one originally suffered.

If we're not open to losing, we're not open to loving.

I can spend years studying and being in therapy and having a very analytic spiritual meditation practice, but without the emotional component, without the softening that comes with love and vulnerability, everything else I do is really just surface.

The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.

Well, any love makes us vulnerable. Whatever we love will give the gift of pain somewhere along the road. But who would live sealed in spiritual cellophane just to keep from ever being hurt? There are a few people like that. I'm sorry for them. I think they are as good as dead.

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

I can tell you that you will have your hearts broken more by the people you love than by the people you hate. But you must still dare to love. The rewards are worth far more than the risks.

-The little things,Emma. The gestures,the moments. And the big. I let him see my heart. I gave it to him,even when I believed he couldn't or wouldn't take it. I gave it anyway-a gift. Even if he broke it. I was very brave. Love is very brave.

It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung.

It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.

Sometimes being fooled by love is worth the price. At least you know you're alive and capable of feeling, even if all you end up with is chest pain.

The trouble with putting armor on is that, while it protects you from pain, it also protects you from pleasure.

Safer than we are.” I told Franny. “Safer than love.” “let me tell ya kid,” Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. “Everything’s safer than love.

To have the chance of being loved we have to take a chance on being destroyed inside

Hearts were made for being broken. There's really no way around it if you want to be a human being.

Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.

Love is unknown. To open the heart in trust is unknown. They say love hurts. It doesn't have to.

I always say you have to be willing to get your heart broken.

I was 29 and I really fell in love, I think, for the first time. I was vulnerable in a way I didn't think I could be.

Everybody has a bit of body armor they wear to protect themselves, and love is about trying to break it down. You have to see who a person really is and connect with her to break that armor.