A Quote by bell hooks
Whether we learn how to love ourselves and others will depend on the presence of a loving environment. Self-love cannot flourish in isolation.
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If we don't love ourselves, we would not love others. When someone tell you to love others first, and to love others more than ourselves; it is impossible. If you can't love yourselves, you can't love anybody else. Therefore we must gather up our great power so that we know in what ways we are good, what special abilities we have, what wisdom, what kind of talent we have, and how big our love is. When we can recognize our virtues, we can learn how to love others.
The basis of all love is self-love and we certainly suffer a lot in our society from lack of self-love. When we don't take care of ourselves, it's really just a symptom of not loving ourselves. So the worst thing that we can do is to beat ourselves up for how we've already treated ourselves.
We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others.
We have the need to be accepted and to be loved by others, but we cannot accept and love ourselves. The more self-love we have, the less we will experience self-abuse. Self-abuse comes from self-rejection, and self-rejection comes from having an image of what it means to be perfect and never measuring up to that ideal. Our image of perfection is the reason we reject ourselves the way we are, and why we don't accept others the way they are.
We ourselves need love; it's not only society, the world outside, that needs love. But we can't expect that love to come from outside of us. We should ask the question whether we are capable of loving ourselves as well as others.
Love of others and love of ourselves are not alternatives. On the contrary, an attitude of love towards themselves will be found in all those who are capable of loving others.
We cannot love others as others unless we possess suficient self-love, a love we learn from being loved in infancy.
We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create
If we do not know how to take care of ourselves and to love ourselves, we cannot take care of the people we love. Loving oneself is the foundation for loving another person.
We cannot give what we do not have: We cannot bring peace to the world if we ourselves are not peaceful. We cannot bring love to the world if we ourselves are not loving. Our true gift to ourselves and others lies not in what we have but in who we are.
The amount of love, kindness, patience I have for others is is directly proportional to how much love I have for myself, because we cannot give others what we ourselves do not have. And, unsurprisingly, the amount of love, respect, support, and compassion I receive from others is also in direct proportion to how much I love myself.
We are wont to condemn self-love; but what we really mean to condemn is contrary to self-love. It is that mixture of selfishness and self-hate that permanently pursues us, that prevents us from loving others, and that prohibits us from losing ourselves.
There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.
Everyone deserves love and appreciation. If there is someone in the world whom we do not love, it is our blessing to work this out within ourselves. A very key spiritual principle, echoed in the Cayce readings as well as mainstream psychology, is that whatever we see in others that makes us angry, sad or jealous is a reflection of an issue we have in ourselves. If we can learn to love, respect and forgive ourselves, then we will not be angered and offended by what we see in others.
We are forever looking outside ourselves, seeking approval and striving to impress others. But living to please others is a poor substitute for self-love, for no matter how family and friends may adore us, they can never satisfy our visceral need to love and honor ourselves.
The second commandment that Jesus referred to was not to love others instead of ourselves, but to love them as ourselves. Before we can love and serve others, we must love ourselves, even in our imperfection. If we don't embrace our own defects, we can't love others with their shortcomings.
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