Leo Buscaglia Love Quotes and Sayings, Photo credit: nolandalla.com
Leo Buscaglia Love Quotes and Sayings
#1-2 A Magazine of People and Possibilities interview
1. I have learned that love is the most powerful force available to us. When we have real love we have the strength to perform miracles.
2. The essence of love is getting out of oneself and into others. When we care less about our feelings, our rights, our happiness, our security, etc., and begin to concern ourselves with the feelings, rights, happiness, and security of others, we will have found the true power of love.
#3-4 The Paraphernalia of Anti-Self, Living, Loving & Learning [S]
3. To love is to risk not being loved in return…To hope is to risk pain…To try is to risk failure. But risk must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing. The person who risks nothing does nothing, has nothing, and is nothing. He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn, feel, change, grow, live, or love.
4. You love to love, not to get something back, or it isn’t love.
#5 Together with Leo Buscaglia, Living, Loving & Learning [S]
5. Relationships and togetherness must be lived in the present. You have to live now, you have to enjoy it now, you have to do for people now.
#6 On Becoming You, Living, Loving & Learning [S]
6. I will love you no matter what. I will love you if you are stupid, if you slip and fall on your face, if you do the wrong thing, if you make mistakes, if you behave like a human being—I will love you no matter.
#7-9 Speaking Of Love, 1980
7. Don’t miss love. It’s an incredible gift. I love to think that the day you’re born, you’re given the world as your birthday present. It frightens me to think that so few people even bother to open up the ribbon! Rip it open! Tear off the top! It’s just full of love and magic and joy and wonder and pain and tears. All of the things that are your gift for being human.
8. The loving person is the person who loves him or herself. I say this so often, and people say, “Oh yes, you’re so right,” but they don’t do it! You will never be able to love anyone else until you love yourself. Even With your Fat Thighs!
9. Love is life. And if you miss love, you miss life.
#10 Born for Love: Reflections on Loving, 1994
10. It is when we ask for love less and begin giving it more that the basis of human love is revealed to us.
#11 Man Needs To Love And Be Loved, Love [S]
11. We need others to love and we need to be loved by them. There is no doubt that without it, we too, like the infant left alone, would cease to grow, cease to develop, choose madness and even death.
#12 Love Has Many Deterrents, Love [S]
12. Love always creates, it never destroys. In this, lies man’s only promise.
#13 A Question of Definition, Love [S]
13. Perfect love is rare indeed. It is to be wondered if any man has ever achieved it.
#14 Quoted in Leo Buscaglia Foundation
14. Only when we give joyfully, without hesitation or thought of gain, can we truly know what love means.
#15-19 A Magazine of People and Possibilities interview with Veronica Hay, 1998
15. We take love for granted. We assume we are all perfect lovers and all we need do is wait and our love will grow and blossom as readily as a flower in spring. Not so. Love doesn’t grow unless we do. It takes patience, knowledge, experience, determination, and every positive trait we possess.
16. A life of love is one of continual growth, where the doors and windows of experience are always open to the wonder and magic that life offers. To love is to risk living fully.
17. We live in a small world. Not a leaf falls that doesn’t effect a myriad of things. When we reach out to someone in love and the effect is made – everyone, everything which comes in contact with the person we’ve effected is better for it. Of course, the converse is true, too.
18. Yes, we are born for love, but it will die if not nurtured.
19. I’d like to be remembered for being a good, kind, loving, gentle man who attempted to live wisely, and who cared a lot.
#20 To Love Others You Must First Love Yourself, Love [S]
20. To love oneself is to struggle to rediscover and maintain your uniqueness. It is understanding and appreciating the idea that you will be the only you to ever live upon this earth, that when you die so will all of your fantastic possibilities. It is the realization that even you are not totally aware of the wonders which lie dormant within yourself.
#21 Love Knows No Age, Love [S]
21. A total immersion in life offers the best classroom for learning to love.
#22 A Question of Definition, Love [S]
22. One does not fall “in” or “out” of love. One grows in love.
#23 Forward to Love, Love [S]
23. Live now. When you are eating, eat. When you are loving, love. When you are talking with someone, talk. When you are looking at a flower, look. Catch the beauty of the moment!
#24 A Question of Definition, Love [S]
24. Love is always open arms. If you close your arms about love you will find that you are left holding only yourself.
#25 Forward to Love, Love [S]
25. I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate—it’s apathy. It’s not giving a damn.
#26 A Question of Definition, Love [S]
26. Love has a different manner of revealing itself through each man. To expect others to love as you do at the moment is unrealistic. Only you are you and can therefore respond to love, give love and feel love as you do.
#27-28 Born for Love: Reflections on Loving, Random House, Incorporated, 1992
27. Love is always bestowed as a gift–freely, willingly, and without expectation. It is offered even when not acknowledged or appreciated. We don’t love to be loved, we love to love.
28. Find the person who will love you because of your differences and not in spite of them and you have found a lover for life.
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Excerpt from Wikipedia: Felice Leonardo “Leo” Buscaglia PhD (March 31, 1924 – June 12, 1998), also known as “Dr. Love,” was an American author and motivational speaker, and a professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Southern California.
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Sayings by Leo Buscaglia
#1 Speaking of Love, 1980
1. The hardest battle you’re ever going to fight is the battle to be just you.
#2 Forward to Love, LOVE [S]
2. We need not be afraid to touch, to feel, to show emotion. The easiest thing in the world to be is what you are, what you feel. The hardest thing to be is what other people want you to be, but that’s the scene we are living in.
#3 Forward to Love, LOVE [S]
3. This loving person is a person who abhors waste —waste of time, waste of human potential. How much time we waste. As if we were going to live forever.
#4 On Becoming You, Living, Loving & Learning [S]
4. I exist, I am, I am here, I am becoming, I make my life and no one else makes it for me. I must face my own shortcomings, mistakes, transgressions. No one can suffer my non-being as I do, but tomorrow is another day, and I must decide to leave my bed and live again. And if I fail, I don’t have the comfort of blaming you or life or God.
#5 On Becoming You, Living, Loving & Learning [S]
5. I believe that you control your destiny, that you can be what you want to be. You can also stop and say, “No, I won’t do it. I won’t behave this way any more. I’m lonely, and I need people around me. Maybe I have to change my methods of behaving.” And then you do it—volitionally.
#6-7 “Dr. Leo Buscaglia Discusses Love.” Jane Pauley, correspondent. NBC Today Show. NBCUniversal Media. 26 Sep. 1980
6. And if I have nothing I can give you nothing, but if I concentrate on becoming all that I am and developing all of my potential, then I can give you all that I am. So that my major concentration is to be the most brilliant, the most sensitive, the most warm, the most loving, the most caring person in the world. Not to keep it for me, you see that’s where it’s stopped in the past generation, but to share it with everyone in my life.
7. We are naive in believing that we live on islands and that we can only love a few people, uh we need to extend it and the more we extend it the more beautiful it becomes, but we have to do it first. We have to broaden ourselves.
#8 Born for Love: Reflections on Loving, Random House, Incorporated, 1992
8. …for there are scores of people waiting for someone just like us to come along; people who will appreciate our compassion, our encouragement, who will need our unique talents. Someone who will live a happier life merely because we took the time to share what we had to give.
#9 Bus 9 to Paradise: A Loving Voyage, Fawcett Columbine, 1987
9. What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.
#10 Love Has Many Deterrents, Love [S]
10. Man is happiest when he is creating. In fact, the highest state of which man is capable lies in the creative act.
#11 Facebook, 31 July 2015 [S]
11. Don’t spend your precious time asking “Why isn’t the world a better place?” It will only be time wasted. The question to ask is “How can I make it better?” To that there is an answer.
#12 Choose Life, LIVING, LOVING & LEARNING [S]
12. There are two big forces at work, external and internal. We have very little control over external forces such as tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, disasters, illness and pain.
What really matters is the internal force. How do I respond to those disasters? Over that I have complete control.
#13 On Becoming You, LIVING, LOVING & LEARNING [S]
13. If you don’t like the scene you’re in, if you’re unhappy, if you’re lonely, if you don’t feel that things are happening, change your scene. Paint a new backdrop.
#14 On Becoming You, LIVING, LOVING & LEARNING [S]
14. Every day is new. Every flower is new. Every face is new. Everything in the world is new, every morning of your life.
#15-16 Bridges Not Barriers, LIVING, LOVING & LEARNING [S]
15. A wonderful realization will be the day you realize that you are unique in all the world. There is nothing that is an accident. You are a special combination for a purpose—and don’t let them tell you otherwise, even if they tell you that purpose is an illusion.
16. You are that combination so that you can do what it is essential for you to do. Don’t ever believe that you have nothing to contribute. The world is an incredible unfulfilled tapestry, and only you can fulfill that tiny space that is yours.
#17 Choose Life, LIVING, LOVING & LEARNING [S]
17. Death is a challenge. It tells us not to waste time. It tells us to grow, it tells us to become! It tells us to tell each other right now that we love each other. It tells us to give ourselves away now!
#18-19 Personhood: The Art of Being Fully Human, Fawcett Columbine, 1982
18. The fact that I can plant a seed and it becomes a flower, share a bit of knowledge and it becomes another’s, smile at someone and receive a smile in return, are to me continual spiritual exercises.
19. Time has no meaning in itself unless we choose to give it significance.
#20 Forward to Love, Love [S]
20. The idea of perfection frightens me. We’re almost afraid to do anything anymore because we can’t do it perfectly.
#21 Forward to Love, Love [S]
21. Being human is the greatest thing in the world, but we’re also funny, and we have to learn to laugh again. After all, we do funny things. We created time, for instance, and then became the slave of time.
#22 Talk “What is Essential is Invisible to the Eye”
22. When a person dies and lies on the Earth’s surface, all is not over. Decomposers begin their job of breaking the person down slowly and as the years go by the person blends into the soil returning all he or she took so that others may live.
Dr.Leo Buscaglia changed the words in the last paragraph of a sign he saw in a redwoods grove which read:
“Even when a tree dies and lies on the earth’s surface, all is not over. Decomposers begin their job of breaking the tree down slowly. As the years go by the tree blends into the soil, returning all it took so that others may live.“
#23 Tomorrow’s Children, Living, loving & learning [S]
23. You only fear death when you’re not living.
#24 The Paraphernalia of Anti-Self, Living, Loving & Learning [S]
24. To keep you hidden, to lose you because of self-defeating ideas is to die. Don’t let that happen. Your greatest responsibility is to become everything that you are, not only for your benefit, but for mine.
#25 That’s Where the Light Is, Living, Loving & Learning, 1985 [S]
25. I forgive my past. I forgive the people who’ve hurt me. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life blaming and pointing a finger.
#26 That’s Where the Light Is, Living, Loving & Learning [S]
26 Forgive others! Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for not being perfect. And accept the responsibility for your own life.
#27 Choose Life, Living, Loving & Learning [S]
27. You are never going to be able to choose life until you learn to forgive!
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Talks and Lectures by Leo Buscaglia and Interviews with him
The Richard Brendan Show: An Interview with Dr. Leo Buscaglia, Originally taped in April of 1998
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A Start, attributed to Leo Buscaglia
Starting each day, I promise myself not to try to solve all my life problems at once — nor shall I expect you to do so;
Starting each day, I shall try to learn something new about me and about you and about the world I live in, so that I may continue to experience all things as if they had been newly born;
Starting each day, I shall remember to communicate my joy as well as my despair, so that we can know each other better;
Starting each day, I shall remind myself to really listen to you and to try to hear your point of view and to discover the least threatening way of giving you mine, remembering that we are both growing and changing in a hundred different ways;
Starting each day, I shall remind myself that I am a human being and not demand perfection of you until I am perfect, so you’re safe;
Starting each day, I shall try to be more aware of the beautiful things in our world — I’ll look at the flowers, I’ll look at the birds, I’ll look at the children, I’ll feel the cool breezes, I’ll eat good food — and I’ll share these things with you;
Starting each day, I shall remind myself to reach out and touch you, gently, with my words, my eyes and with my fingers, because I don’t want to miss feeling you;
Starting each day, I shall dedicate myself again to the process of being a lover — and then see what happens;
You know, I’m really convinced that if you were to define love, the only word big enough to engulf it all would be “Life” — LOVE IS LIFE — in all its aspects … And if you miss love, you miss life!
Please don’t!
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Unsourced Leo Buscaglia Quotes
1. The most unfortunate thing that happens to a person who fears failure is that he limits himself by becoming afraid to try anything new.
2. Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.
3. Don’t brood. Get on with living and loving. You don’t have forever.
4. Don’t hold to anger, hurt or pain. They steal your energy and keep you from love.
5. Every moment spent in unhappiness is a moment of happiness lost.
6. 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.
7. Life is uncharted territory. It reveals its story one moment at a time.
8. Bearing grudges only hurts you. Forgiveness forgives you, releases you.
9. 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.
10. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.