“Love has nothing to do with someone else. It is all about you. It is a way of being. It essentially means you have brought sweetness into your emotion. If a loved one travels to another country, would you still be able to love them? You would. If a loved one passed away, would you still be able to love them? You would. Even if a loved one is not physically with you anymore, you are still capable of being loving. So, what is love then? It is just your own quality. You are only using the other person as a key to open up what is already within you.”
Source: Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Sadhguru 97
Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian 1957Related quotes
Source: Everything Is Illuminated
Varanasi 5th Public Talk (28 November 1964), The Collected Works, Vol. XV
1960s
Context: You know, actually we have no love — that is a terrible thing to realize. Actually we have no love; we have sentiment; we have emotionality, sensuality, sexuality; we have remembrances of something which we have thought as love. But actually, brutally, we have no love. Because to have love means no violence, no fear, no competition, no ambition. If you had love you will never say, "This is my family." You may have a family and give them the best you can; but it will not be "your family" which is opposed to the world. If you love, if there is love, there is peace. If you loved, you would educate your child not to be a nationalist, not to have only a technical job and look after his own petty little affairs; you would have no nationality. There would be no divisions of religion, if you loved. But as these things actually exist — not theoretically, but brutally — in this ugly world, it shows that you have no love. Even the love of a mother for her child is not love. If the mother really loved her child, do you think the world would be like this? She would see that he had the right food, the right education, that he was sensitive, that he appreciated beauty, that he was not ambitious, greedy, envious. So the mother, however much she may think she loves her child, does not love the child. So we have not that love.
“If you loved someone, really loved them, would you let them go?”
Source: Mercy
opening prayer, p. 3
1840s, Works of Love (1847)
Variant: When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.
Source: Anna Karenina
Source: The Foundation series (1951–1993), Foundation’s Edge (1982), Chapter 20 “Conclusion” section 4, p. 420