Love

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Flaming Heart (Prawny,
Morguefile)

Empathy quotes x4
(Cagle Cartoons; fair use, educational)

Love

Question to self: Choose to Love?
Similar emotions: Sympathy, Trust, Acceptance, Friendliness, Kindness, Devotion, Adoration, Infatuation, Empathy.
Opposite emotions: Cruelty, Disgust, Hate.

Bach Flower Remedies: Holly [to develop compassion], Chicory [possessiveness or manipulation or overprotection disguised as love], Heather [self-centred, self-absorbed].
California Flower Essences: Bleeding Heart [overcoming unhealthy attachment in relationships], Love-Lies-Bleeding [the ability to understand personal pain and sacrifice as a way of helping others], Mariposa Lily [supplies motherly love].

Quotes

30 words for Love in Ancient Greece
While we have one word for love, the Ancient Greek language had more than 30. For example, the word eros meant physical passion, while philia denoted affection for a family member, one's own community or even abstract concepts, such as knowledge. Philautia, on the other hand, represented the important concept of self-respect, and agape could be translated today as unconditional love. It seems that the Ancient Greek had a pretty comprehensive notion of love.
(Adapted from BBC [link broken as at 2020], dated 2016, accessed 1 June 2016)

True love is not a feeling but a state of consciousness. Those who cultivate true love as a state of consciousness see everything anew, for love has this extraordinary capacity of making us see human beings, nature and the creatures inhabiting it as we were seeing them for the first time.
Only love is able to sense the subtle currents of life that pass through us, and these currents are constantly being renewed. Objective and physical knowledge of what exists is not enough to fulfil us. Take for example someone who might be capable of exploring the entire universe: they would end up feeling a void, and even feeling bored if they have not learnt to make contact with the subtle currents of life that flow through all beings and through everything. (O.M. Aïvanhov)

Love, tender feelings, and sexual satisfaction entail parasympathetic arousal – the physiological opposite of the “fight-or-flight” mobilization shared by fear and anger. The parasympathetic pattern, dubbed the “relaxation response,” is a bodywide set of reactions that generates a general state of calm and contentment, facilitating cooperation. (Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, p.7)

Resources

How to Define Love (wikiHow).

A cartoon with four quotes on empathy. Three are wise, by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and Gustave Gilbert, investigator of the Nazis. Respectively these quotes are: "Empathy is patiently and sincerely seeing the world through the other person's eyes. It is not learned in school; it is cultivated over a lifetime." "The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism." "It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy." Finally, the fourth quote is by Elon Musk: "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy."

This is part of a series on Emotion

Also see:-

Emotion

Emotion Index

Love articles, e.g.:-
- Culture of Love
- Self-Love
- Angelic Love
- Cosmic Love
- Choose to Love

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