Disinterested Love Quotes

• Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Love, Friendship, Real

  'The Good-Natured Man' (1768) act 1

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• Great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us.

  Walter Pater

  Passion, Giving, Sorrow

  Walter Pater (2013). “The Renaissance”, p.125, Simon and Schuster

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• Agape is disinterested love. . . . Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people, or any qualities people possess. It begins by loving others for their sakes. . . . Therefore, agape makes no distinction between friend and enemy; it is directed toward both.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Faith, People, Enemy

  Martin Luther King (Jr.) (1964). “A Martin Luther King Treasury”

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• The Dalai Lama said that he thinks mother's love is the best symbol for love and compassion, because it is totally disinterested.

  Richard Gere

  Mother, Love Is, Thinking

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• Falsehood is never better than truth, theft better than honesty, treachery better than loyalty, cowardice better than courage.

  Harry Emerson Fosdick

  Loyalty, Honesty, Cowardice

  Harry Emerson Fosdick (1952). “A faith for tough times”

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• Granted the endless variations of moral customs, still the essential standards persist. As in a scientific laboratory, all else may change but the standards are unalterable- disinterested love of truth, fidelity to facts, accuracy in measurement, exactness of verification-so, in life as a whole, the towering ethical criteria remain unshaken. Falsehood is never better than truth, theft better than than honesty, treachery better than loyalty, cowardice better than courage.

  Harry Emerson Fosdick

  Loyalty, Truth, Honesty

  Harry Emerson Fosdick (1952). “A faith for tough times”

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• The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time; our sense of that, not a disinterested love of science, and certainly not wisdom, is why we devote such a huge proportion of the ingenuity and income of our societies to finding faster ways of doing things - as if the final aim of mankind was to grow closer not to a perfect humanity, but to a perfect lightning-flash.

  John Fowles

  Time, Perfect, Humanity

  JOHN FOWLES (1969). “THE FRENCH LIEUTENTANT'S WOMAN”

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• The soul is a temple; and God is silently building it by night and by day. Precious thoughts are building it; disinterested love is building it; all-penetrating faith is building it.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Night, Love Is, Soul

  Henry Ward Beecher, Truman Jeremiah Ellinwood (1872). “The Original Plymouth Pulpit: Sermons of Henry Ward Beecher in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn”

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• Even the most disinterested love is, after all, but a kind of bargain, in which self-love always proposes to be the gainer one wayor another.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Love, Self, Kind

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• The intellectual power, honesty, lucidity, courage, and disinterested love of the truth of the most gifted thinkers of the eighteenth century remain to this day without parallel. Their age is one of the best and most hopeful episodes in the life of mankind.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Honesty, Hopeful, Intellectual

  Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy (2001). “The Power of Ideas”, p.52, Princeton University Press

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