Favorite Quotes From A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson

I wanted to put all the great points I got from A Return to Love in one place so i could remember them better and find them more easily. That's what this is. Maybe there is something useful in here for you! :)

"When infants aren't held, they can become sick, even die. It's universally accepted that children need love, but at what age are people supposed to stop needing it? We never do. We need love in order to live happily, as much as we need oxygen in order to live at all."

"Again--nothing you do or think or wish or make is necessary to establish your worth."

"When we stop trying to control events, they fall into a natural order, and order that works."

"'God' means love, and 'will' means thought. God's will, then, is loving thought."

"To say that we're on earth to serve God, means that we're on earth to love."

"To forgive is merely to remember only the loving thoughts you gave in the past, and those that were given you. All the rest must be forgotten."

"To ask for another relationship, or another job, is not particularly helpful if we're going to show up in the new situation exactly as we showed up in the last one."

"God and man are the ultimate creative team. God is like electricity. A house can be wired for it, but if there aren't any light fixtures, what good does that do?  ...we are His lamps. It doesn't matter the size of the lamp, or it's shape, or design. All that matters is that is gets plugged in. It doesn't matter who we are, or what our gifts are. All that matters is that we are willing to be used in His service. ...Lamps without electricity cast no light, and electricity without lamps cast no light either. Together, however, they cast out all darkness."

"God isn't separate from us, because He's the love inside our minds. Every problem, inside and out, is due to a separation from love on someone's part. Thirty-five thousand people a day die of hunger on earth, and there's no dearth of food. The question is not 'what kind of God would let children starve?' but rather, 'What kind of people let children starve?'"

"We must consciously recognize that, for God, there is no order of difficulty in miracles. Love heals all wounds. No problem is too small for God's attention, or too big for Him to handle."

"We will learn to love one another, but weather we learn it painfully or peacefully is entirely us to us."

"At the last moment, when things look the worst, God does tend to appear. Not because He had a sadistic sense of humor, waiting until we're totally desperate before showing us his muscle. He takes so long because it's not until then that we bother to think about Him. All this time, we thought we were waiting for Him. Little did we know, He was waiting for us."

"If I choose to bless another person, I will always end up feeling more blessed. If I project guilt onto another person, I will always end up feeling more guilty."

"Relationships exist to hasten out walk to God."

"A Course in Miracles says that everyone we meet will either be out crucifier or our savior, depending on what we choose to be to them."

"The places in our personality where we tend to deviate from love are not out faults, but our wounds. God doesn't want to punish us, but to heal us. And that is how He wishes us to view the wounds in other people."

"Forgiveness is 'selective remembering'--a conscious decision to focus on love and let the rest go."

"'Do you prefer that you be right or happy?' If you're judging a brother, you're wrong even if you're right."

"By bringing the past into the present, we create a future just like the past. By letting the past go, we make room for miracles."

"Darkness is merely the absence of light, and fear is merely the absence of love. We can't get rid of the darkness by hitting it with a baseball bat, because there is nothing to hit. If we want to be rid of the darkness, we must turn on a light. Similarly, if we want to be rid of fear, we cannot fight it but must replace it with love.

"Pain doesn't stem from the love we're denied by others, but rather from the love that we deny them. In a case like that, it feels as though we're hurt by what someone else did. But what really has occurred is that someone else's closed heart has tempted us to close our own, and it is our own denial of love that hurts us. That's why the miracle is a shift in our own thinking: the willingness to keep our own heart open, regardless of what's going on outside us."

"Someone with whom we have a lifetime's worth of lessons to learn is someone whose presence in our lives forces us to grow...those who consciously or unconsciously challenge our fearful positions. They show us our walls. Our walls are our wounds--the places where we feel we can't love any more, can't connect any more deeply, can't forgive past a certain point. We are in each other's lives in order to help us see where we most need healing, and in order to help us heal."

"The purpose of a relationship is not for two incomplete people to become one, but rather for two complete people to join together for the greater glory of God."

"Praying for the right person is useless if we're not ready to receive him."

"Love is a decision."

"What is not loved is not understood."

"Dear God, please show me what it is I'm not seeing."

"When you ask God to heal your life, He shines a very bright light on everything you need to look at. You end up seeing things about yourself that maybe you'd rather not see."

"There is a story about Leonardo da Vinci that has always moved me. Early in his career, he was painting a picture of Christ and found a profoundly beautiful young male to model for his portrait of Jesus. Many years later, Leonardo was painting a picture that included Judas. He walked through the streets of Florence looking for the perfect person to play the great betrayer. Finally he found someone dark-looking enough, evil-seeming enough to do the job. He went up to the man to approach him to do the modeling. The man looked at him and said, 'You don't remember me, but I know you. Years ago, I was the model for your picture of Jesus.'"

"The last thing you want to do--ever--is to buy into the insidious delusion that spiritual lives and spiritual relationships are always quiet or always blissful."

"We're affected by other peoples' lovelessness only to the extent to which we judge them for it."

"The price you pay for not taking responsibility for your own pain is the failure to realise that you can change your conditions by changing your thoughts."

"The only real problem is that you have forgotten who you are."  (she was talking about being a child of God)

"The only advantage of knowing that you're angry, is so that you can make a choice to be otherwise."

"Just because we have an honest feeling, that doesn't mean it's who we honestly are. My angry self is not the real me. Does it have to be acknowledged? Yes, but only in order to go beyond it."

"Our true, purely loving self can never be uncreated."

"Love is not neutral. It takes a stand. It is the commitment to the attainment of the conditions of peace for everyone involved in a situation."

"We don't get married to escape the world; we get married to heal it together."

"This world is dysfunctional! But there is nothing we have been through, or seen, or done, that cannot be used to make out lives more valuable now."

"As we love, we shall be release from pain."

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world."

"The cosmic spotlight isn't pointed at you; it radiates from within you."

"Don't go to work to make money; go to work to spread joy."

"Miracles mean that at any moment we can begin again."

"There's no more potent way to thank God for your gifts, or to increase them, than by sharing them. You will be given as much power in the world as you are willing to use on His behalf."

"Our power lies in our clarity about why we're on the earth."

"Serving three people is as important as serving three hundred."

"The body is a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and complete idea."

"The Holy Spirit finds ways to express His power through vehicles we can accept. Medicine is such a vehicle."

"Anything used to spread joy and communicate love is a part of God's plan for salvation."

"Suffering, I've found, gives you X-ray vision into the suffering of others."

"Happiness is a sign that we have accepted God's will."

"Hope is born of participation in hopeful solutions."

"...you don't have to be a virtuoso at everything you do, in order to be a virtuoso at life. Virtuosity in life means singing out--not necessarily singing well."

(Quoted from the Book Quantum Healing, Dr. Deepak Chopra) "An Ohio University study of heart disease in the 1970s was conducted by feeding quite toxic, high-cholesterol diets to rabbits in order to block their arteries, duplicating the effect that such a diet has on a human arteries. Consistent results began to appear in all the rabbit groups except for one, which strangely displayed 60 percent fewer symptoms. Nothing in the rabbits' physiology could account for their high tolerance to the diet, until it was discovered by accident that the student who was in charge of feeding these particular rabbits liked to fondle and pet them. He would hold each rabbit lovingly for a few minutes before feeding it; astonishingly, this alone seemed to enable the animals to overcome the toxic diet. Repeat experiments, in which one group of rabbits was treated neutrally while the others were loved, came up with similar results. Once again, the mechanism that causes such immunity is quite unknown--it is baffling to think that evolution has built into the rabbit mind an immune response that needs to be triggered my human cuddling."