“The beautiful is not that which we love and because we love it, but that which by its objective value obliges us to love it.”

“Of God's love we can say two things: it is poured out universally for everyone from the Pope to the loneliest wino on the planet; and secondly, God's love doesn't seek value, it creates value. It is not because we have value that we are loved, but because we are loved that we have value. Our value is a gift, not an achievement.”

William Sloane Coffin (1924–2006) American activist

“We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

“God's love for us is not the reason for which we should love him. God's love for us is the reason for us to love ourselves.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

“If we look at the world with a love of life, the world will reveal its beauty to us.”

Daisaku Ikeda (1928) Japanese writer

“Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.”

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) American playwright and novelist

“It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never no helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object of its love.”

Sigmund Freud book Civilization and Its Discontents

“The love that follows us sometime is our trouble, which still we thank as love.”

William Shakespeare Macbeth

“We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered- our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.”

Jonathan Safran Foer (1977) Novelist

“True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist