Hand-picked quotes about love from the best non-fiction books

You cannot be a person worthy of love when your primary goal in life is to passively be loved.

When you require another individual for your survival, you are a parasite on that individual. There is no choice, no freedom involved in your relationship. It is a matter of necessity rather than love.

Couples cannot resolve issues of marriage without the security of knowing the act of struggling over these issues will not itself destroy the relationship.

When a couple falls out of love they may begin to really love. When we act lovingly despite the fact that we don’t feel loving.

Your children are not your children. Give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. Their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward.

Given love and support, most children grow into happy, productive adults independent of whatever theory of parenting they were raised with.

Love is not a feeling. Love is an action. Taking loving and constructive action toward a person you consciously dislike. Genuine love implies commitment and the exercise of wisdom. True love is a committed, thoughtful decision.

We love someone when the importance of his or her needs and desires rises to the level of our own.

Love is not simply giving; it is judicious giving and judicious withholding as well. It is judicious praising and judicious criticizing. It is judicious arguing, struggling, confronting, urging, pushing and pulling in addition to comforting.

Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.