Quotes about Agape

Agape love is the decision to keep loving and seeking the best for someone even when we don't feel like it, even when that person sins against us.

There, again and again, we find the New Testament writers emphasizing instead love, agap?, as the highest activity, the one that binds everything else together-

Famously the KJV translates agap? as 'charity'. Many grumbled when modern translations replaced it with 'love'. Not many realized that the modern translations were simply reverting to what Tyndale had had in the first place.

The only hope of success is the way of love as agape rather than eros. From this rival perspective, the secret of the search is not our "great ascent" but "the great descent" - of God toward us. Instead of the seeker finding love, love seeks out the seeker - not because the seeker is worthy of love but simply because love's nature is to love regardless of the worthiness or merit of the one loved.

This is the secret of life: the self lives only by dying, finds its identity (and its happiness) only by self-forgetfulness, self-giving, self-sacrifice, and agape love.

And over all these virtues put on love, which is the bond of perfect unity.

Seek and you shall find" does not refer to anything else: long life, conquest of earthly enemies, freedom from pain, disease, death, betrayal, weakness, and so on. But it does refer to God and to that which God is: "God is agap?." That is why all who seek it find it. De Caussade says: "If you search for this kingdom where God alone rules, you can be quite sure you will find it" (p. 112).

8. Charity (agape), or willing the good of the other. Since this love comes from the will rather than the feelings, and since angels have wills, angels have this love.

A person should have as our goal complete agape (self-sacrificial love). The most we can expect from a society is to institute simple justice.

Thomas Oord, in his Science of Love and elsewhere, defines or describes love as acting intentionally, in sympathetic response to others (including God), to promote overall well-being. I believe this to be one of the better efforts toward articulating agape love. Most importantly, it distinguishes love from desire, and locates it in the will, leaving room for desire and feeling to play an appropriate role in love without making them the heart of the matter. 

Contemporary wording of Jesus's comparison of God's kind of love, agape, and what normally passes for love might be "What's so great if you love those who love you? Terrorists do that! If that's all your 'love' amounts to, God certainly is not involved. Or suppose you are friendly to 'our kind of people.' So is the Mafia!" (Matthew 5:46—47).

Agape, the Christian word, means unconquerable benevolence. It means that, no matter what people may do to us by way of insult or injury or humiliation, we will never seek anything else but their highest good. It