There is much love in loving than being loved.

- M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS

One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn't it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim "You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself" made clear sense. And I add, "Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.

- bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

Couples in distress too often turn to solutions that can be summed up by "You do your thing and I'll do my thing" or "You take care of yourself and I'll take care of myself." We hear pop psychology pronouncements such as "I'm not ready to be in a relationship" and "You have to love yourself before anyone can love you."Is any of this true? Is it really possible to love yourself before someone ever loves you?Think about it. How could this be true? If it were true, babies would come into this world already self-loving or self-hating. And we know they don't. In fact, human beings don't start by thinking anything about themselves, good or bad. We learn to love ourselves precisely because we have experienced being loved by someone. We learn to take care of ourselves because somebody has taken care of us.

- Stan Tatkin, Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner's Brain and Attachment Style Can Help You Defuse Conflict and Build a Secure Relationship

For Tahitians there is nothing more desirable than love, being loved and making love. They are in love with the idea of love even more than they are with a real person. Love is free, passion unrestrained and wild, and all love stories, no matter how long they last, one day, a year or forever, are equally beautiful.

- Carol Vorvain, Why Not?: The island where happiness starts with a question

The only way love can last a lifetime is if it's unconditional. The truth is this: love is not determined by the one being loved but rather by the one choosing to love.

- Stephen Kendrick, The Love Dare

As we explore new ways of loving and being loved by others, we need to equip ourselves with open, pliant minds; we need to be willing to investigate, experiment, and evaluate as we approach a topic we thought we knew so much about.

- Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

If dual torment is to be my one condition,both of loving and being loved I would quit.

- Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Poems, Protest, and a Dream: Selected Writings

Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.

- John Dufresne, Love Warps the Mind a Little

The Widow Nazaret never missed her occasional appointments with Florentino Ariza, not even during her busiest times, and it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved, although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love, but without the problems of love.

- Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Because, if you could love someone, and keep loving them, without being loved back . . . then that love had to be real. It hurt too much to be anything else.

- Sarah Cross, Kill Me Softly