Leo Buscaglia Quotes & Sayings

The majority of us lead quiet, unheralded lives as we pass through this world. There will most likely be no ticker-tape parades for us, no monuments created in our honor. But that does not lessen our possible impact, for there are scores of people waiting for someone just like us to come along; people who will appreciate our compassion, our unique talents. Someone who will live a happier life merely because we took the time to share what we had to give. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have a potential to turn a life around. It's overwhelming to consider the continuous opportunities there are to make our love felt. — Leo Buscaglia

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

A single rose can be a garden ... a single friend, my world. — Leo Buscaglia

A life lived in love will never be dull. — Leo Buscaglia

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. — Leo Buscaglia

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 ... — Leo Buscaglia

To that there is an answer. — Leo Buscaglia

We are no longer puppets being manipulated by outside powerful forces: we become the powerful force ourselves. — Leo Buscaglia

Love revels in and grows in the moment and the joy of the moment. — Leo Buscaglia

Knowing that one is always capable of change, the second step lies in making the decision to change. Change does not occur by merely willing it anymore than behavior changes simply through insight. — Leo Buscaglia

Don't brood. Get on with living and loving. You don't have forever. — Leo Buscaglia

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! — Leo Buscaglia

If you don't like the scene you're in, if you're unhappy, if you're lonely, if you don't feel that things are happening, change your scene. Paint a new backdrop. — Leo Buscaglia

Happiness and love are just a choice away. — Leo Buscaglia

A life without passion is not living, it's merely existing — Leo Buscaglia

Never idealize others. They will never live up to your expectations. Don't over-analyze your relationships. Stop playing games. A growing relationship can only be nurtured by genuineness. — Leo Buscaglia

A loving relationship is one in which the loved one is free to be himself
to laugh with me, but never at me; to cry with me, but never because of me; to love life, to love himself, to love being loved. Such a relationship is based upon freedom and can never grow in a jealous heart — Leo Buscaglia

Each of our acts makes a statement as to our purpose. — Leo Buscaglia

Man created words to free himself — Leo Buscaglia

God made mud, God made dirt, God made boys so girls could flirt. — Leo Buscaglia

In order to learn, you have to be free. You have to be free to experiment, free to try, free to make mistakes ... — Leo Buscaglia

Life is a paradise for those who love many things with a passion. — Leo Buscaglia

Love is always open arms. — Leo Buscaglia

Choose the way of life. Choose the way of love. Choose the way of caring. Choose the way of goodness. It's up to you. It's your choice. — Leo Buscaglia

It is when we ask for love less and begin giving it more that the basis of human love is revealed to us. — Leo Buscaglia

The greatest risk is to risk nothing at all — Leo Buscaglia

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. — Leo Buscaglia

"To be is to do," says the existentialist. "One only becomes real (human) at the point of action." — Leo Buscaglia

I believe that you control your destiny, that you can be what you want to be. You can also stop and say, 'No, I won't do it, I won't behave his way anymore. I'm lonely and I need people around me, maybe I have to change my methods of behaving,' and then you do it. — Leo Buscaglia

Why do we protect children from life? It's no wonder that we become afraid to live. We're not told what life really is. We're not told that life is joy and wonder and magic and even rapture, if you can get involved enough. We're not told that life is also pain, misery, despair, unhappiness, and tears. I don't know about you, but I don't want to miss any of it. I want to embrace life, and I want to find out what it's all about. I wouldn't want to go through life without knowing what it is to cry. — Leo Buscaglia

In love, each man is his own personal challenge. — Leo Buscaglia

Loving relationships, though necessary for life, health, and growth, are among the most complicated skills. Before we can be successful at achieving relationships, it is necessary that we broaden our understanding of how they work, what they mean and how what we do and believe can enhance or destroy them. We can accomplish this only if we are willing to put in the energy and take the time to study failed relationships as well as examine successful ones. Loving relationships cannot be taken lightly. Unless we are looking for pain, they must not be forever approached in a trial and error fashion. Too many of us have experienced the cost of these lackadaisical approaches in terms of tears, confusion and guilt. — Leo Buscaglia

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

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

A total immersion in life offers the best classroom for learning to love. — Leo Buscaglia

Every moment spent in unhappiness is a moment of happiness lost. — Leo Buscaglia

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

If you're an advocate of gentleness, you're simplistic and naive. If you're an advocate of despair and hate, you're sophisticated. — Leo Buscaglia

If you make mistakes, if you act like a human being- I will love you no matter. — Leo Buscaglia

I love to think that the day you're born, you're given the world as a birthday present. — Leo Buscaglia

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

I exist, I am, I am here, I am becoming, I make my own life and no one else makes it for me. I must face my own shortcomings, mistakes, transgressions. No one can suffer my non-being as I do, but tomorrow is another day, and I must decide to leave my bed and live again. And if I fail, I don't have the comfort of blaming you or life or God. — Leo Buscaglia

I was one of those fortunate individuals who grew up in a large, passionate, demonstrative Italian family where we were taught to love as naturally as we breathed and ate giant bowls of pasta! — Leo Buscaglia

A life without love, no matter how many other things we have, is an empty, meaningless one. — Leo Buscaglia

Live nutty. Just occasionally. Just once in a while. And see what happens. It brightens up the day. — Leo Buscaglia

People are not here to meet your expectations. — Leo Buscaglia

When it comes to giving love, the opportunities are unlimited, and we are all gifted. — Leo Buscaglia

We all need each other. — Leo Buscaglia

Nine times out of ten, when you extend your arms to someone, they will step in, because basically they need precisely what you need. — Leo Buscaglia

To live in love is to live in life, and to live in life is to live in love — Leo Buscaglia

Love and self are one and the discovery of either is the realization of both — Leo Buscaglia

There are many miracles in the world to be celebrated and, for me, garlic is the most deserving. — Leo Buscaglia

You can't imagine the joy I feel when I hear that something I've said or done or written has helped others to regain their sense of dignity, to motivate them to develop their unique
potential, to encourage them to reach out to others in love. — Leo Buscaglia

Let go. Why do you cling to pain? There is nothing you can do about the wrongs of yesterday. It is not yours to judge. Why hold on to the very thing which keeps you from hope and love? — Leo Buscaglia

We created time, and now we have become the slave of time. — Leo Buscaglia

Each man lives love in his limited fashion and does not seem to relate the resultant confusion and loneliness to his lack of knowledge about love. — Leo Buscaglia

When love is accompanied with deep intimacy, it raises us to the highest level of human experience. In this exalted space, we can surrender our egos, become vulnerable and know levels of joy and well-being unique among life experiences. We attain a glimpse of the rapture that can be ours. Boundaries are blurred, there are no limitations and we rejoice in union. We become one and, at the same time, both. — Leo Buscaglia

Love is life...and if you miss love, you miss life. — Leo Buscaglia

The lover must often say, "I love because I must, because I will it. I love for myself, not for others. I love for the joy it gives me - and incedentally, only - for that joy it gives to others. If they reinforce me it will be good. If they do not, it also will be good, for I will to love." — Leo Buscaglia

Love deeply and passionately. You might get hurt,
but it is the only way to live life completely. — Leo Buscaglia

I get so sick and tired of hearing people gripe about what their parents did to them. You know what your parents did to you? The best thing they could do. The best thing they knew how, the only thing in many cases that they knew how. Nobody has set out maliciously to hurt their child, unless they were psychotic. — Leo Buscaglia

Hold on to your dreams for they are, in a sense, the stuff of which reality is made. It is through our dreams that we maintain the possibility of a better, more meaningful life. — Leo Buscaglia

To love oneself is to struggle to rediscover and maintain your uniqueness — Leo Buscaglia

Listening is love in action. — Leo Buscaglia

This loving person is a person who abhors waste-waste of time, waste of human potential. How much time we waste. As if we were going to live forever. — Leo Buscaglia

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

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. — Leo Buscaglia

I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things ... I play with leaves. I skip down the street and run against the wind. — Leo Buscaglia

A single rose can be my garden; a single friend, my world. — Leo Buscaglia

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. — Leo Buscaglia

To live in love is life's greatest challenge. It requires more sublety, flexibility, sensitivity, understanding, acceptance, tolerance, knowledge and strength than any other human endeavor. — Leo Buscaglia

Change. It has the power to uplift, to heal, to stimulate, surprise, open new doors, bring fresh experience and create excitement in life. Certainly it is worth the risk. — Leo Buscaglia

To the extent to which you know yourself, and we are all more alike than different, you can know others. When you love yourself, you will love others. And to the depth and extent to which you can love yourself, only to that depth and extent will you be able to love others. — Leo Buscaglia

We find we have little to guide us in our search and must put trust in the only power we have, that natural instinct that propels us toward creation, choice, liberation and change. We must yield to the challenge of becoming fully human and trust in our human processes in the hope that they will lead us there. Out challenge then is clear, to make as much of the illusion as possible a reality. After all, our reality is not more than what was once our illusion. — Leo Buscaglia

Forgive others, forgive yourself, forgive yourself for not being perfect, and accept responsibility for your own life. — Leo Buscaglia

Life is our greatest possession and love its greatest affirmation. — Leo Buscaglia

In the end you have only you. — Leo Buscaglia

The life and love we create is the life and love we live. — Leo Buscaglia

You can only give away what you have ... If you have love, you can give it. If you don't have it, you don't have it to give. — Leo Buscaglia

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. — Leo Buscaglia

Your talent is God's gift to you. — Leo Buscaglia

If he desired to know about automobiles, he would, without question, study diligently about automobiles. If his wife desired to be a gourmet cook, she'd certainly study the art of cooking, perhaps even attending a cooking class. Yet, it never seems as obvious to him that if he wants to live in love, he must spend at least as much time as the auto mechanic or the gourmet in studying love. — Leo Buscaglia

There is nothing quite so satisfying, and so healing, as a good cry. — Leo Buscaglia

A wife says to her husband (or vice versa), "Do you love me?""Of course," he replies. "I've been married to you for twenty years, haven't I?"How satisfied would we be if we presented someone with a vintage wine and, upon asking his opinion of it, he replied, "I'm drinking it, aren't I?"Love still needs expression between those who share it. — Leo Buscaglia

I don't know about you, but I don't feel that it's my vehicle that is essential. I don't know about you, but I don't feel that it's my education that is essential. I don't think what is essential about me is my house or my car or my clothes. What is essential about me? Well, I think what is essential is that I live and embrace life right now, wherever I am. I grab it in my arms! Don't spend time crying about yesterday-yesterday is over with! I forgive my past. I forgive the people who've hurt me. I don't want to spend the rest of my life blaming and pointing a finger. — Leo Buscaglia

What do years have to do with age? — Leo Buscaglia

The oppposite of Love is not Hate - it's apathy. — Leo Buscaglia

When we cling to pain, we end up punishing ourselves. — Leo Buscaglia

The essence of education is not to stuff you with facts but to help you discover your uniqueness, to teach you how to develop it, and then to show you how to give it away. — Leo Buscaglia

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

Compassion is an act of tolerance where kindness and forgiveness reign. When we make the compassionate choice, we enhance the dignity of each individual, which is the very essence of loving them. — Leo Buscaglia

The hardest battle you're ever going to fight is the battle to be just you. — Leo Buscaglia

A wonderful realization will be the day you realize that you are unique in all the world. There is nothing that is an accident. You are a special combination for a purpose
and don't let them tell you otherwise, even if they tell you that purpose is an illusion. (Live an illusion if you have to). You are that combination so that you can do what is essential for you to do. Don't ever believe that you have nothing to contribute. The world is an incredibly unfulfilled tapestry. And only you can fulfill that tiny space that is yours. — Leo Buscaglia

We have to get children to understand that not only do they have this incredible uniqueness, but they also have something that sometimes we forget about. They are also potentiality. They are much more undiscovered than they are discovered. And there's the wonder of it. It doesn't matter where they are, they're only just beginning and the big magical trip of life is digging it all out and discovering the wonderful you. — Leo Buscaglia

I am often accused of being childish. I prefer to interpret that as child-like. I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things. I tend to exaggerate and fantasize and embellish. I still listen to instinctual urges. I play with leaves. I skip down the street and run against the wind. I never water my garden without soaking myself. It has been after such times of joy that I have achieved my greatest creativity and produced my best work. — Leo Buscaglia

We seem to gain wisdom more readily through our failures than through our successes. We always think of failure as the antithesis of success, but it isn't. Success often lies just the other side of failure. — Leo Buscaglia

It is difficult for some people to accept that love is a choice. This seems to run counter to the generally accepted theory of romantic love which expounds that love is inborn and as such requires no more than to accept it. — Leo Buscaglia

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. — Leo Buscaglia

Live,love and learn — Leo Buscaglia

The only people who become wealthy by being concerned with the future are insurance companies. — Leo Buscaglia