Leo Buscaglia Quotes

Celebrate your humanness, celebrate your craziness, celebrate your inadequacies, celebrate your loneliness ... but celebrate YOU!

My rule is always, People first and things second.

Relish love in your old age! Aged love is like aged wine; it becomes more satisfying, more refreshing, more valuable, more appreciated and more intoxicating!

He must understand that if he is the world's finest plum and someone he loves does not like plums, he has the choice of becoming a banana. But he must be warned that if he chooses to become a banana, he will be a second rate banana. But he can always be the best plum.

Love is not a thing, it is not lost when given. You can offer your love completely to hundreds of people and still retain the same love you had originally.

Every day we are offered new means for learning and growing in love.

Child development: Most damaging course of action is attempting to keep children from experience or protect them from pain, for it is this time that children learn that life is a magic thing, if "not a rose garden." The parent's role is primarily to stand by with a good supply of band-aids.

We are not evil, inadequate or incompetent when our relationships fail.

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.

Love is spontaneous and craves expression through joy, through beauty, through truth, even through tears. Love lives the moment; it's neither lost in yesteryear nor does it crave for tomorrow. Love is NOW!

I just saw an ad the other day that I couldn't believe. There was this woman-and I think it's degrading to womankind-she was going out of her mind over a new product called "A Thousand Flushes." Here she was in her toilet, saying, "Oh, I love this product!" and, "My life is complete!" Good God-if your joy depends on "A Thousand Flushes," you're sick!

To love others you must first love yourself.

Don't look over people's shoulders. Look in their eyes. Don't talk at your children. Take their faces in your hands and talk to them. Don't make love to a body, make love to a person.

Our talents are the gift that God gives to us... What we make of our talents is our gift back to God

Never idealize others. They will never live up to your expectations.

Definition of a relationship - an enduring, mutually-agreed upon connection or union, which fulfills certain needs of the individuals involved and the society in which they live.

Life is a great and wondrous mystery, and the only thing we know that we have for sure is what is right here right now. Don't miss it.

Listening is love in action.

Don't hold to anger, hurt or pain. They steal your energy and keep you from love.

There is seemingly so little love shared in this world, it is not surprising that we ask, "Where have all the lovers gone?" Since love is the most vital energy for good that is within our power to utilize, it is puzzling why we so seldom do so. Love is just a useless, abstract idea until we put it into action...unless we are always actively living in love, we are not utilizing the greatest gift we have been given and which we, in turn, have to offer.

Love withers with predictability; its very essence is surprise and amazement. To make love a prisoner of the mundane is to take its passion and lose it forever.

Happiness is intrinsic, it's an internal thing. When you build it into yourself, no external circumstances can take it away.

Loving yourself involves the discovery of the true wonder of you; not only the present you, but the many possibilities of you. It involves the continual realization that you are unique, like no other person in the world, that life is, or should be, the discovery, the development and the sharing of this uniqueness.

Success often lies just the other side of failure.

Love is always open arms. If you close your arms about love you will find that you are left holding only yourself.

People are not here to meet your expectations.

I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate - it's apathy. It's not giving a damn.

When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom

Love yourself-accept yourself-forgive yourself-and be good to yourself, because without you the rest of us are without a source of many wonderful things.

In love, each man is his own personal challenge.

We need others. 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.

If one wishes to know love, one must live love, in action.

We all need each other.

Life is our greatest possession and love its greatest affirmation.

Most of us remain strangers to ourselves, hiding who we are, and ask other strangers, hiding who they are, to love us.

Value yourself. The only people who appreciate a doormat are people with dirty shoes.

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.

Love is always changing and unless we stay aware and change with it, it eludes us.

You are the only you ... You are the best you. You will always be the second best anyone else.

As long as you are free, you are free to select and choose alternatives, provided that you are willing to accept the responsibility for being free. And after you've tried your alternatives, and they don't work as you would wish, don't blame me. Blame your choice. Try another alternative.

Only when we give joyfully, without hesitation or thought of gain, can we truly know what love means.

We all fear what we don't know - it's natural.

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.

We all need to be recognized for what we're doing, for our work. Every once in a while we need someone to come up to us and say, 'You're beautiful. That was well done. That's nice.'

To laugh is to risk appearing a fool, to weep is to risk appearing too sentimental, to reach out for another is to risk involvement, and to expose feelings is to risk exposing one's true self.

It is the foregiver who is freed in foregiving.

Why do some people always see beautiful skies and grass and lovely flowers and incredible human beings, while others are hard-pressed to find anything or any place that is beautiful?

Death is a challenge. It tells us not to waste time... It tells us to tell each other right now that we love each other.