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Seedthoughts
Love: How well attached am I?

1. We must be our own before we can be another's. --Ralph Waldo Emerson
2. When a person seeks from others that which he needs to find within himself, he only creates a lonely, alienated existence. --Jerry Greenwald
3. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. --Henry David Thoreau
4. Human beings are not meant to live solitary lives. [We are] "hard-wired," genetically programmed to develop and function by interacting with others. Talking, touching, and relating to others is essential to our well being. --John Rowe & Robert Kahn
5. The healing power of love and intimacy . . . I am not aware of any other factor in medicine--not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery--that has a greater impact on our quality of life, incidence of illness, and premature death from all causes.
   --Dean Ornish
6. If I told patients to raise their blood levels of immune globulins or killer T-cells, no one would know how. But if I can teach them to love themselves and others fully, the same things happen automatically. The truth is: Love heals. --Bernie Siegel
7. If you will let people be wrong, most of whatever love is may begin.
   --John Ciardi
8. Loving can cost a lot but not loving costs more. --Merle Shain
9. When I think of all you have meant to me all these years, it is almost more than I can do, not to tell you.
   --New England farmer to his mate of countless years
10. Love is unconditional--it makes no bargains, it trades with no one for anything, but conveys the feeling, the in-the-bones belief to the other that you are all for him, that you are there to give him your support, to contribute to his development as best you can, because the other is what he is, not because he is something you want or expect him to be, but because you value him for what he is. --Ashley Montagu
11. There is an odd kind of equity which holds when people interact with each other. In effect, we get what we give, both in amount and kind. Each of us seems to have his own bookkeeping system for love and for pain. Over time, the books are balanced. --G. Patterson
12. Genuine love not only respects the individuality of the other but actually seeks to cultivate it, even at the risk of separation or loss. --M. Scott Peck
13. A person is a bushel of things, some good and some not so good. You can't just have the good. You can't throw out the bad like you would a rotten apple. It's all stuck together so you accept each other the way you are.
    --woman married to an industrious, faithful, and consistently grouchy husband for nearly forty years

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