Leo Buscaglia Quotes - Page 8

Love withers with predictability; its very essence is surprise and amazement. To make love a prisoner of the mundane is to take its passion and lose it forever.

Man is happiest when he is creating. In fact, the highest state of which man is capable lies in the creative act.

There is only the moment. The now. Only what you are experiencing at this second is real.

I was one of those fortunate individuals who grew up in a large, passionate, demonstrative Italian family where we were taught to love as naturally as we breathed and ate giant bowls of pasta!

If we wish to free ourselves from enslavement, we must choose freedom and the responsibility this entails.

A growing relationship can only be nurtured by genuineness.

To place your ideas and your dreams before the crowd is to risk being called naive.

Everybody is teaching Everybody to Love at every moment.

Happiness comes only when we push our brains and hearts to the farthest reaches of which we are capable. The purpose of life is to matter-to count, to stand for something, to have it make so difference that we lived at all.

Labels are distancing phenomena. They push us away from each other.

To the extent to which you know yourself, and we are all more alike than different, you can know others. When you love yourself, you will love others. And to the depth and extent to which you can love yourself, only to that depth and extent will you be able to love others.

We have to get children to understand that not only do they have this incredible uniqueness, but they also have something that sometimes we forget about. They are also potentiality. They are much more undiscovered than they are discovered. And there's the wonder of it. It doesn't matter where they are, they're only just beginning and the big magical trip of life is digging it all out and discovering the wonderful you.

We will only begin to forgive when we can look upon the wrongdoers as ourselves, neither better nor worse. We need to remember that we coexist as mortals in the world, together, the wronged and the wrongdoer, and that, in our common humanity, the situation could readily be reversed.

A wife says to her husband (or vice versa), "Do you love me?""Of course," he replies. "I've been married to you for twenty years, haven't I?"How satisfied would we be if we presented someone with a vintage wine and, upon asking his opinion of it, he replied, "I'm drinking it, aren't I?"Love still needs expression between those who share it.

When we give ourselves in love we become our most vulnerable. We are never safe. We become open to disappointment and hurt.

Experience seems to convince us that only fools trust, that only fools believe and accept all things. If this is true, then love is most foolish. For if it is not founded on trust, belief and acceptance, it's not love.

When we feel joyful, euphoric, happy, we are more open to life, more capable of seeing things clearly and handling daily tensions.

Happiness and love are just a choice away.

There is seemingly so little love shared in this world, it is not surprising that we ask, "Where have all the lovers gone?" Since love is the most vital energy for good that is within our power to utilize, it is puzzling why we so seldom do so. Love is just a useless, abstract idea until we put it into action...unless we are always actively living in love, we are not utilizing the greatest gift we have been given and which we, in turn, have to offer.

That's love. That's all it means. It means sharing joy with people.

To this day I cannot see a bright daffodil, a proud gladiola, or a smooth eggplant without thinking of Papa. Like his plants and trees, I grew up as a part of his garden.

Child development: Most damaging course of action is attempting to keep children from experience or protect them from pain, for it is this time that children learn that life is a magic thing, if "not a rose garden." The parent's role is primarily to stand by with a good supply of band-aids.

There is a good deal of excellent research on child's play. It has shown conclusively that through play, with the freedom of action it allows and the stressless environment in which it occurs, children discover, relate to and define themselves and their world. ...It is, therefore, paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play.

After all, the wrong is done. It is past and cannot be changed. We have only the present and the future upon which to move forward.

If he desired to know about automobiles, he would, without question, study diligently about automobiles. If his wife desired to be a gourmet cook, she'd certainly study the art of cooking, perhaps even attending a cooking class. Yet, it never seems as obvious to him that if he wants to live in love, he must spend at least as much time as the auto mechanic or the gourmet in studying love.