“Had we not loved ourselves at all, we could never have been obliged to love anything. So that self-love is the basis of all love.”

“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it…”

“we had made love without love, half-dressed most of the time and always in the dark so we could imagine ourselves as better than we were.”

“We never love someone. We just love the idea we have of someone. It's a concept of ours - summing up, ourselves - that we love.”

“It all seems so sad, so unbearably sad for a second, to think of the lovely old maple with the swing. We never told the tree how much we loved it. We never gave it a name, never did anything for it.”

“We love because Love sets us free, and we say things that we once never even had the courage to whisper to ourselves.”

“But to see her was to love her;
Love but her, and love for ever.
Had we never lov'd sae kindly,
Had we never lov'd sae blindly,
Never met—or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.”

“True love is radical because it requires us to see ourselves in all people. Otherwise, it isn’t love. Love is revolutionary because it has us treat ALL people as we would ourselves - not because we are charitable, but because we are one. That is love’s radical conclusion.”

“We never love anyone. Not really. We only love our idea of another person. It is some conception of our own that we love. We love ourselves, in fact.”

“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.”