Love doesn’t mean a state of perfect caring. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now — and to go on caring through joyful times and through times that may bring us pain.

Loving someone means helping them to be more themselves, which can be different from being what you'd like them to be, although often they turn out the same.

Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.

To love is to be delighted by the happiness of someone, or to experience pleasure upon the happiness of another. I define this as true love.

To love someone means to see them as God intended them.

Love for a person is acceptance of him or her the way he is and the way he is not.

You know that to love is both to swim and to drown. You know to love is to be a whole, partial, a joint, a fracture, a heart, a bone. It is to bleed and heal. It is to be in the world, honest. It is to place someone next to your beating heart, in the absolute darkness of your inner, and trust they will hold you close. To love is to trust, to trust is to have faith. How else are you meant to love? You knew what you were getting into, but taking the Underground, returning home with no certainty of when you will see her next, it is terrifying.

Perhaps we do not yet know what the word “to love” means. There are within us lives in which we love unconsciously. To love thus means more than to have pity, to make inner sacrifices, to be anxious to help and give happiness; it is a thing that lies a thousand fathoms deeper, where our softest, swiftest, strongest words cannot reach it. At moments we might believe it to be a recollection, furtive but excessively keen, of great primitive unity. There is in this love a force that nothing can resist.

Love is to recognize that the other person is a person, is precious, is important and has value..Each one has a gift to bring to others. Each one has his or her mission in the larger family of humanity. Each one reveals the secret face of God.

To be loved means to be recognized as existing.

Loving is limbically distinct from in love. Loving is mutuality ; loving is synchronous attunement and modulation. As such, adult love depends critically upon knowing the other. In love demands only the brief acquaintance necessary to establish an emotional genre but does not demand that the book of the beloved’s soul be perused from preface to epilogue. Loving derives from intimacy, the prolonged and detailed surveillance of a foreign soul.

But to be loving is simply this: a willingness to respond freely and openly. Right now, it may be limited to one or two people in your lives. But it is possible to extend this ability to embrace the entire world.

Has it ever occurred to you that you can only love when you are alone? What does it mean to love? It means to see a person, a thing, a situation, as it really is and not as you imagine it to be, and to give it the response it deserves. You cannot love what you do not even see.

I have defined love as the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth. Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional. The person who truly loves does so because of a decision to love.