“Love is an experience of consciousness, an experience in the soul of man. It is some thing that is a great releasing power against the tyranny of personal attitudes. It is placing something bigger than one’s self in the foreground of life. It is dedicating one’s acts to projects, to purposes, to convictions that are of common good to all mankind.

Love is not just a single thing. It is not something that is born full-blown from the unknown and the invisible.

To have a true understanding of love, the individual must grow. He must not only outgrow selfishness and self-will, but he must also go above and beyond what might be called the pressures of society upon his life. He has to be an individual. He has to live his principles, whether others do or not.

Out of the cultivation of those gentle virtues which make possible true love, we are also keeping faith with the great principles of integrity which support our world.”

Excerpted from Lecture Note #313, from a lecture given April 3, 1983

© 1994 The Philosophical Research Society