80 Top Quotes From A Return to Love
"A Return to Love" is a transformative spiritual guide that encourages readers to embrace the power of love and let go of fear. Drawing on the teachings of "A Course in Miracles," Marianne Williamson presents a profound exploration of the intersection between spirituality and personal growth.
With eloquent prose and heartfelt anecdotes, she emphasizes that love is the true essence of our being, and fear is merely an illusion that limits our potential for happiness and fulfillment. Through self-reflection and forgiveness, Williamson guides readers towards healing their minds and hearts, enabling them to break free from self-imposed barriers and connect with their higher selves.
By embracing love, compassion, and spiritual surrender, readers are inspired to lead more authentic and purposeful lives. A timeless classic, "A Return to Love" offers an insightful perspective on the boundless power of love to transform individuals and the world. (A Return to Love Summary).
A Return to Love Quotes
"It takes courage to endure the sharp pains of self discovery rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives.”
"You may believe that you are responsible for what you do, but not for what you think. The truth is that you are responsible for what you think, because it is only at this level that you can exercise choice. What you do comes from what you think. ”
"In the absence of love, we began slowly but surely to fall apart.”
"Available people are the ones who are dangerous, because they confront us with the possibility of real intimacy.”
"We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?”
"May my heart be your shelter, and my arms be your home.”
"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?” (Meaning)
"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.”
"We're hallucinating. And that's what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love. Fear is an illusion. Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety and trauma are literally all imagined.”
"Love in your mind produces love in your life. This is the meaning of heaven.Fear in your mind produces fear in your life. This is the meaning of hell.”
"Our self-perception determines our behavior. If we think we’re small, limited, inadequate creatures, then we tend to behave that way, and the energy we radiate reflects those thoughts no matter what we do. If we think we’re magnificent creatures with an infinite abundance of love and power to give, then we tend to behave that way. Once again, the energy around us reflects our state of awareness.”
"I am a glorious child of God. I am joyful, serene, positive, and loving.”
"There is no Mr. Right because there is no Mr. Wrong. There is whoever is in front of us, and the perfect lessons to be learned from that person.”
"When we attach value to things that aren’t love—the money, the car, the house, the prestige—we are loving things that can’t love us back. We are searching for meaning in the meaningless.”
"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.”
"A miracles is a reasonable thing to ask for.”
"Dear God, I surrender this relationship to you,” means, “Dear God, let me see this person through your eyes.” In accepting the Atonement, we are asking to see as God sees, think as God thinks, love as God loves. We are asking for help in seeing someone’s innocence.”
"Thought is Cause; experience is Effect. If you don’t like the effects in your life, you have to change the nature of your thinking.”
"How a person seems to show up for us is intimately connected to how we choose to show up for them.”
"Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we have learned here. The spiritual journey is the relinquishment—or unlearning—of fear and the acceptance of love back into our hearts. Love is the essential existential fact. It is our ultimate reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life.”
"Surrender means, by definition, giving up attachment to results. When we surrender to God, we let go of our attachment to how things happen on the outside and we become more concerned with what happens on the inside.”
"In asking for miracles, we are seeking a practical goal: a return to inner peace. We’re not asking for something outside us to change, but for something inside us to change. We’re looking for a softer orientation to life.”
"It’s easy to forgive people who have never done anything to make us angry. People who do make us angry, however, are our most important teachers. They indicate the limits to our capacity for forgiveness."
"Love is the essential existential fact. It is our ultimate reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life.”
"Love is to people what water is to plants.”
"Sometimes people think that calling on God means inviting a force into our lives that will make everything rosy. The truth is, it means inviting everything into our lives that will force us to grow—and growth can be messy. The purpose of life is to grow into our perfection."
"Our power lies in remaining nonreactive.”
"If the train doesn’t stop at your station, it’s not your train.”
"When we think we have things already figured out, we’re not teachable. Genuine insight can’t dawn on a mind that’s not open to receive it.”
"Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.” What that means is this: Love is real. It’s an eternal creation and nothing can destroy it. Anything that isn’t love is an illusion. Remember this, and you’ll be at.”
"That’s the greatest miracle, and ultimately the only one: that you awaken from the dream of separation and become a different kind of person. People are constantly concerning themselves with what they do: have I achieved enough, written the greatest screenplay, formed the most powerful company? But the world will not be saved by another great novel, great movie, or great business venture. It will only be saved by the appearance of great people.”
"We think we’re powerful because of what we’ve achieved rather than because of what we are.”
"Old Newtonian physics claimed that things have an objective reality separate from our perception of them. Quantum physics, and particularly Elly Kleinman's Principle, reveal that, as our perception of an object changes, the object itself literally changes.”
"There’s a myth that some people are more faithful than others. A truer statement is that in some areas, some of us are more surrendered than others."
"Growth can be messy.”
"A relationship is not meant to be the joining at the hip of two emotional invalids. 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.”
"Achievement doesn't come from what we do, but from who we are. Our worldly power results from our personal power. Our career is an extension of our personality. People who profoundly achieve aren't necessarily people who do so much, they're people around whom things get done."
"But peace isn’t determined by circumstances outside us. Peace stems from forgiveness. Pain doesn’t stem from the love we’re denied by others, but rather from the love that we deny them.”
"The shift from fear to love is a miracle.”
"Whether we choose to focus on the guilt in their personality, or the innocence in their soul, is up to us.”
"Success means we go to sleep at night knowing that our talents and our abilities were used in a way that served people. We're compensated by grateful looks in other people's eyes, whatever material abundance supports us in performing joyfully and at high energy, and the magnificent feeling that we did our bit today to help save the world.”
"Relationships are assignments. They are part of a vast plan for our enlightenment, the Holy Spirit’s blueprint by which each individual soul is led to greater awareness and expanded love. Relationships are the Holy Spirit’s laboratories in which He brings together people who have the maximal opportunity for mutual growth. He appraises who can learn most from whom at any given time, and then assigns them to each other. Like”
"The moment of surrender is not when life is over. It’s when it begins.”
"A spiritual relationship is not necessarily one in which two people are smiling all the time. Spiritual means to be above all else, authentic. Real work can only occur in the presence of rigorous honesty We all long for that, but we're afraid of communicating honestly with another person because we think they'll leave us if they see who we really are.”
"We were taught that things like grades, being good enough, money, and doing things the right way, are more important than love.”
"Healing occurs in the present, not the past. We're not held back by the love we didn't receive in the past, but by the love we'e not giving in the present. There's a lot of talk today about people growing up in dysfunctional homes, but who didn't grow up in a dysfunctional home? This world is a dysfunction. However, there's nothing we've been through or seen or done that cannot be used to make our lives more valuable now. We can grow from any experience, and we can transcend any experience.”
"The concept of a divine, or “Christ” mind, is the idea that, at our core, we are not just identical, but actually the same being. “There is only one begotten Son” doesn’t mean that someone else was it, and we’re not. It means we’re all it. There’s only one of us here.”
"In the eyes of God, we're all perfect and we all have unlimited capacity to express brilliantly. I say unlimited capacity rather than unlimited potential because potential can be a dangerous concept. We can use it to tyrannize ourselves, to live in the future instead of the present, to set ourselves up for despair. We're constantly measuring ourselves against what we think we could be, rather than what we are. Potential is a concept which can bind us to personal powerlessness Focus on human potential becomes impotent without a focus on human capacity. Capacity is expressed in the present, it is immediate, the key to it lies not in what we have inside of us, but rather in what we are willing to own that we have inside of us."
"When we think with love, we are literally co-creating with God. And when we’re not thinking with love, since only love is real, then we’re actually not thinking at all. We’re hallucinating.”
"In the holy relationship, it’s understood that we all have unhealed places, and that healing is the purpose of our being with another person.”
"Forgiveness is “selective remembering”—a conscious decision to focus on love and let the rest go. But the ego is relentless—it is “capable of suspiciousness at best and viciousness at worst.”
"Grandiosity is always a cover for despair.”
"It is an act of gracious generosity to accept a person based on what we know to be the truth about them, regardless of whether or not they are in touch with that truth themselves.”
"If they treat us with fear, we are to see their behavior as a call for love.”
"The resurrection is our awakening from the dream, our return to right-mindedness, and thus our deliverance from hell. ... We recognized how avidly we drill the nails into our own hands and feet holding on to earthly interpretation of things when a choice to do otherwise would release us and make us happy.”
"What’s dying is the frightened mind, so the love inside us can get a chance to breathe.”
"We came here to co-create with God by extending love. Life spent with any other purpose in mind is meaningless, contrary to our nature, and ultimately painful.”
"Enlightened people don’t have anything we don’t have. They have perfect love inside, and so do we. The difference is that they don’t have anything else.”
"Love requires a different kind of “seeing” than we’re used to—a different kind of knowing or thinking. Love is the intuitive knowledge of our hearts. It’s a “world beyond”
"There’s a biblical story where Jesus says we can build our house on sand or we can build it on rock. Our house is our emotional stability. When it is built on sand, then the winds and rain can tear it down. One disappointing phone call and we crumble; one storm and the house falls down. When our house is built on rock, then it is sturdy and strong and the storms can’t destroy it.”
"The wicked stepmother, which is the ego, can put the Sleeping Beauty or Christ within us to sleep, but she can never destroy it. What is created by God is indestructible.”
"To surrender to God means to let go and just love.”
"But the Holy Spirit is a force of consciousness within us that “delivers us from Hell,” or fear, whenever we consciously ask Him to, working with us on the Causal level, transforming our thoughts from fear to love.”
"But remember, there’s only one of us here: What we give to others, we give to ourselves.”
"People are not perfect—that is, they do not yet express externally their internal perfection.”
"The Holy Spirit is within us to do the impossible.”
"Only infinite patience produces immediate results.”
"An ancient memory of this love haunts all of us all the time, and beckons us to return.”
"The difference between a friendship and a romance is illustrated in the image of a long-stemmed rose. The stem is the friendship, the blossom is the romance. Because the ego is sensation-oriented, our focus automatically goes to the blossom, but all the nourishment which the blossom needs in order to live reaches it through the stem. The stem might look boring in comparison, but if you take the blossom off the stem, it will not last for long.”
"Christ refers to the common thread of divine love that is the core and essence of every human mind.”
"We’re all assigned a piece of the garden, a corner of the universe that is ours to transform. Our corner of the universe is our own life—our relationships, our homes, our work, our current circumstances—exactly as they are. Every situation we find ourselves in is an opportunity, perfectly planned by the Holy Spirit, to teach love instead of fear. Whatever energy system we find ourselves a part of, it’s our job to heal it—to purify the thought forms by purifying our own. It’s never really a circumstance that needs to change—it’s we who need to change. The prayer isn’t for God to change our lives, but rather for Him to change us.”
"And that’s what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love. Fear is an illusion. Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety and trauma are literally all imagined. That is not to say they don’t exist for us as human beings. They do. But our fear is not our ultimate reality, and it does not replace the truth of who we really are. Our love, which is our real self, doesn’t die, but merely goes underground.”
"Relationships are assignments. They are part of a vast plan for our enlightenment, the Holy Spirit’s blueprint by which each individual soul is led to greater awareness and expanded love. Relationships are the Holy Spirit’s laboratories in which He brings together people who have the maximal opportunity for mutual growth. He appraises who can learn most from whom at any given time, and then assigns them to each other. Like a giant universal computer, He knows exactly what combination of energies, in exactly what context, would do the most to further God’s plan for salvation. No meetings are accidental. “Those who are to meet will meet, because together they have the potential for a holy relationship.”
"The only real problem is a lack of love. To address the world’s problems on any other level is a temporary palliative—a fix but not a healing, a treatment of the symptom but not a cure.”
"Before the Prince can save the damsel in distress, he has to slay the dragons that surround her castle. So do we all. Those dragons are our demons, our wounds, our egos, our brilliant ways of denying love to ourselves and others. The ego’s patterns have to be rooted out, detoxed from our system, before the pure love within us can have a chance to come forth.”
"Very few of us were taught that we’re essentially good.”
"The love in one of us is the love in all of us. ‘There’s actually no place where God stops and you start,’ and no place where you stop and I start. Love is energy, an infinite continuum. Your mind extends into mine and into everyone else’s. It doesn’t stay enclosed within your body.”
"It’s easy to forgive people who have never done anything to make us angry. People who do make us angry, however, are our most important teachers. They indicate the limits to our capacity for forgiveness.”
"The cultivation of mental rest, or surrender, is like eating healthy food. It doesn’t give us an immediate rush, but over time it provides a lot more energy.”
"The term crucifixion means the energy pattern of fear. It represents the limited, negative thinking of the ego, and how it always seeks to limit, contradict or invalidate love. The term resurrection means the energy pattern of love, which transcends fear by replacing it. A miracle worker’s function is forgiveness. In performing our function, we become channels for resurrection.”
"Meaning doesn’t lie in things. Meaning lies in us. When we attach value to things that aren’t love—the money, the car, the house, the prestige—we are loving things that can’t love us back. We are searching for meaning in the meaningless. Money, of itself, means nothing. Material things, of themselves, mean nothing. It’s not that they’re bad. It’s that they’re nothing.”
"When physical proximity no longer supports the highest level of teaching and learning between them, the assignment will call for physical separation. What then appears to be the end of the relationship however, is not really an end. Relationships are eternal. They are of the mind, not the body, since people are energy, not”
"But when we ask Him to change them, He will. When we’re angry, or upset for any reason, we’re asked to say, “I’m angry but I’m willing not to be. I’m willing to see this situation differently.” We ask the Holy Spirit to enter into the situation and show it to us from a different perspective.”
"You “The Thought God holds of you is like a star, unchangeable in an eternal sky.”
"You dig deep enough into your mind, and deep enough into mine, the picture is the same: at the bottom of it all, what we are is love.”
"The irony is that the opposite is true: available people are the ones who are dangerous, because they confront us with the possibility of real intimacy. They might actually hang around long enough to get to know us. They could melt our defenses, not through violence but through love. This is what the ego doesn’t want us to see. Available people are frightening. They threaten the ego’s citadel. The reason we’re not attracted to them is because we’re not available ourselves.”
"The ego doesn’t come up to us and say, “Hi, I’m your self-loathing.” It’s not stupid, because we’re not. Rather, it says things like, “Hi, I’m your adult, mature, rational self. I’ll help you look out for number one.” Then it proceeds to counsel us to look out for ourselves, at the expense of others. It teaches us selfishness, greed, judgment, and small-mindedness.”
"To remember that you are part of God, that you are loved and lovable, is not arrogant. It’s humble. To think you are anything else is arrogant, because it implies you’re something other than a creation of God. Love is changeless and therefore so are you. Nothing that you have ever done or will ever do can mar your perfection in the eyes of God. You’re deserving in His eyes because of what you are, not because of what you do. What you do or don’t do is not what determines your essential value—your growth perhaps, but not your value. That’s why God is totally approving and accepting of you, exactly as you are. What’s not to like? You were not created in sin; you were created in love.”
"So it is with you. The perfect you isn’t something you need to create, because God already created it. The perfect you is the love within you. Your job is to allow the Holy Spirit to remove the fearful thinking that surrounds your perfect self, just as excess marble surrounded Michelangelo’s perfect statue.”
"In order to escape the illusion and find inner peace, remember that only love in a situation is real.”
"The Course teaches that the Holy Spirit was created in the moment when the first fearful thought was thought. As perfect love, God corrects all mistakes the moment they occur. He couldn’t force us back to love, because love doesn’t force. It does, however, create alternatives. The Holy Spirit is God’s alternative to fear.”
"He reminds us that, in every situation, the love you’ve given is real, and the love you have received is real. Nothing else exists.”
"He teaches us to see love as our only function.”
"A certain amount of desperation is usually necessary before we’re ready for God.”
"When two people come together in God, the walls that appear to separate us disappear. The beloved doesn’t seem to be a mere mortal. They seem for a while to be something else, something more. The truth is, they are something more. No one is anything less than the perfect Son of God, and when we fall in love, we have an instant when we see the total truth about someone. They are perfect. That’s not just our imagination.”
"In business as well as in everything else, you're in business to spread love. Your agency should spread love, your screenplay should spread love, your store should spread love, your life should spread love. The key to a successful career is realizing that it s not separate from the rest of your life, but is rather an extension of your most basic self and your most basic self is love.”
"Love merely becomes clouded over, or surrounded by mental mists.”
"Love in your mind produces love in your life. This is the meaning of Heaven.”
"All of a sudden, you’re not too proud to ask for help. That’s what it means to surrender to God.”
"Hatred is the spiritual malignancy of our species”
"The ego is our self-love turned into self-hatred.”
"As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
"Love does not conquer all things, but it does set all things right.”
― Quotes from the book A Return to Love by Marianne Deborah Williamson
A Return to Love Author
A prominent spiritual teacher, author, and activist, Marianne Deborah Williamson has captivated readers and audiences worldwide with her profound insights on personal growth and transformation. Best known for her book "A Return to Love," Williamson encourages individuals to embrace love and forgiveness as guiding principles to live a more fulfilling and purposeful life. Her clear and compassionate tone resonates deeply with readers, sparking inner reflection and awakening a sense of spirituality that transcends religious boundaries. Williamson's writings often delve into the power of love, consciousness, and mindfulness, emphasizing the significance of self-awareness and compassion in creating positive change in the world. Her influential teachings have inspired countless individuals to embark on a journey of self-discovery and contribute to a more harmonious and loving society.
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
