Welcome to Monday’s Motivational Message
A Program of the George Snow Scholarship Fund
Each Monday we will send you motivational quotes and messages that we hope will
energize your spirit and set the tone for the week ahead.
This Week’s Message: Love
By Ellie Lingner
Love: n. 1. a deep and tender feeling of affection for or attachment or devotion to
a person or persons 2. an expression of one’s love or affection (give Mary my love)
3. a feeling of brotherhood and good will toward other people.
“I love that car. I loved that movie. I love ice cream. I love the ocean. I love my new
phone. I love my fiancé. I know my mom loves me.”
Love of God, country, humankind...name your favored concepts, beliefs, ideals.
Love runs the gamut from the most mundane to the most important things in life.
Take an inventory of whom and/or what you love, why, and are you proud of it.
What you love defines you. When you examine what it is that you grace with your
love, you learn a lot about yourself and your values. Are you fixated on the material
world or do you look beyond it to the spiritual and emotional?
Do you toss around the word “love,” as in a phone call to a casual friend that ends
with “I love you,” or do you say it only to a select few and only when you really mean
it? Do you think about it before you say it or do you toss it off as casually as you would
say “see you later”?
What sacrifices are you willing to make for love? If you say you love your country, are
you willing to die for it?
If you are in a relationship with a special someone, would you stay if that person
contracted a lifelong illness?
When you consider your love for your parents, does it include the possibility of having
to care for them in their old age?
Love has been written about, lauded and cursed since the beginning of time.
Throughout history, many have died for love--love of people (remember Romeo and
Juliet?), places (wars), ideas (religion and politics), and things (think love of money
and power).
Love is a precious commodity that can build up or tear down. Never take it lightly.
Week’s Quotes:
Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.” Jean Anouilh (Ardele (1948).
“Love is Nature’s second sun.” George Chapman, All Fools (c.1599).
“Unable are the Loved to die / For Love is Immortality.” Emily Dickinson, Poem
(c.1864).
“Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.” John Donne, “A Lecture Upon the
Shadow,” Songs and Sonnets (1633).
“There is more pleasure in loving than in being loved.” Thomas Fuller, M.D.
Gonomologia (1732).
“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your
own.,” Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961).
“The love we give away is the only love we keep.” Elbert Hubbard, The Note Book
(1927).
“The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved.” Victor Hugo,
“Fantine,” Les Miserables (1862).
“No matter what you’ve done for yourself or for humanity, if you can’t look back on
having given love and attention to your own family, what have you really
accomplished?” Lee Iacocca, Talking Straight (1988).
“We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless
we love ourselves. But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving
others.” Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island (1955).
“If you’d be loved, be worthy to be loved.” Ovid, The Art of Love (c. 8 A.D.).
“Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking
outward together in the same direction.” Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars
(1939).
“Love is not only something you feel. It’s something you do.” David Wilkerson.
“Ironic, isn’t it, that in tennis ‘love’ is nothing, but in life ‘love’ is everything.”
“A bell is not a bell until you ring it; a song is not a song until you sing it. Love in
your heart is not put there to stay; love is not love until you give it away.” Oscar
Hammerstein II.