In true love, you attain freedom.

TRUE LOVE MAKES US HAPPY. If love doesn't make us happy, it's not love; it's something else. Love is a wonderful thing. It gives us the ability to offer joy and happiness, relieve suffering, and transcend all kinds of separation and barriers.

In true love, you attain freedom. When you love, you bring freedom to the person you love. If the opposite is true, it is not true love. You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free. (p.4, Shambhala Publications)

True love includes a sense of responsibility and accepting the other person as she is, with all her strengths and weaknesses. If you only like the best things in a person, that is not love.

Love, understanding, courage, and acceptance are expressions of the life of Jesus.

Love can bring us happiness and peace as long as we love in such a way that we don't make a net to confine ourselves and others. We can tell the correct way to love because, when we love correctly, we don't create more suffering.

True love doesn't contain suffering or attachment. It brings well-being to ourselves and others.

This much is certain, that we have no theological right to set any sort of limits to the loving-kindness of God which has appeared in Jesus Christ. Our theological duty is to see and understand it as being still greater than we had seen before.

To love someone means to see him as God intended him.

Our wives don't have to "deserve" it. A Christian husband doesn't love his wife only when she is lovable. He loves her whenever Christ deserves to be reverenced, which, of course, is always.

Your heavenly Father-in-Law never takes his eyes off his beloved child. He hears every word uttered in anger toward his children. He sees every act of violence; he witnesses every act of denial, manipulation, and control. Never imagine that he witnesses such assaults with a dispassionate apathy; on the contrary, he feels each slight as though you were persecuting Christ himself.

response—"Lord, how can I love him [or her] today like he [or she] has never been loved?" The answer may be very practical: take over a chore, speak a word of encouragement, take care of something that needs fixing. Or it may be romantic, or over-the-top creative, or generous, or very simple.