Quotes & Sayings About Love Refusal

Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. — Martin Luther King Jr.

At root, evangelical anti-intellectualism is both a scandal and a sin. It is a scandal in the sense of being an offense and a stumbling block that needlessly hinders serious people from considering the Christian faith and coming to Christ. It is a sin because it is a refusal, contrary to Jesus' two great commandments, to love the Lord our God with our minds. Anti-intellectualism is quite simply a sin. Evangelicals must address it as such, beyond all excuses, evasions, or rationalizations of false piety. — Os Guinness

History as a whole is the struggle between love and the inability to love, between love and the refusal to love. — Pope Benedict XVI

The first time Mr. Darcy asked Lizzy to marry him in Pride and Prejudice, he went about it all wrong," I started, smiling at the connection I'd just made in my mind. "He insulted her and her
family. But after her refusal, he made a conscious effort to change for the better, and everything worked out for them the second time he proposed. It's the same with us. You learned from your past mistakes, and everything's different now. Just as Lizzy gave Mr. Darcy a second chance, I'm going to do the same for you."
"I'm glad that Lizzy gave Mr. Darcy a second chance." He smiled at the comparison. "She was the only one for him. He would have been miserable without her."
"And she would have been miserable without him." I laughed. "Even though she might not have admitted it. — Michelle Madow

The beauty of this idea is that my decision to keep Peeta alive at the expense of my own life is itself an act of defiance. A refusal to play the Hunger Games by the Capitol's rules. My private agenda dovetails completely with my public one. And if I really could save Peeta ... in terms of a revolution, this would be ideal. Because I will be more valuable dead. They can turn me into some kind of martyr for the cause and paint my face on banners, and it will do more to rally people than anything I could do if I was living. But Peeta would be more valuable alive, and tragic, because he will be able to turn his pain into words that will transform people. — Suzanne Collins

Hell is the proof of God's failure or refusal to love. — Charles Baxter

My refusal to follow my husband's God-given leadership hurts the gospel, hurts the name of Christ, and repels unbelievers from finding the real love and real life that is only available in Jesus. — April Cassidy

By this act He affirms that the enemy of love is pride, and that the enemy of all good is the refusal to love. — Antonin Sertillanges

Everything else falls away except for the family you're born into, choose, or make; the circle of love you'll die to protect and keep near you. The only thing that keeps us rooted in the past is our refusal to embrace the present. — Karen Marie Moning

And always, everywhere, there would be the yelling or quietly authoritative hypnotists; and in the train of the ruling suggestion givers, always everywhere, the tribes of buffoons and hucksters, the professional liars, the purveyors of entertaining irrelevances. Conditioned from the cradle, unceasingly distracted, mesmerized systematically, their uniformed victims would go on obediently marching and countermarching, go on, always and everywhere, killing and dying with the perfect docility of trained poodles. And yet in spite of the entirely justified refusal to take yes for an answer, the fact remained and would remain always, remain everywhere - the fact that there was this capacity even in a paranoiac for intelligence, even in a devil worshipper for love; the fact that the ground of all being could be totally manifest in a flowering shrub, a human face; the fact that there was a light and that this light was also compassion — Aldous Huxley

Delight in smooth sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts ... genuine love of peace and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation ... the utter devotion of the Liberals to sentiment apart from reality ... though free from wickedness or evil design, played a definite part in the unleashing upon the world of horrors and miseries [WWII] — Winston S. Churchill

Love reveals its insanity by its refusal to acknowledge the inherent NORMALITY of the loved one — Alain De Botton

I committed a sin the day I refused you - I discovered metal inside me where my heart should be - forgive me, Love, for acting on principles ... — John Geddes

Part of why I love New York so deeply is exactly this elusiveness. This refusal to be caught is what allows it to carry such fantasy, mystery and myth, yet also be home. It is simultaneously no one's city and everyone's city. — Becky Cooper

I didn't know how much I could love until you were gone. Until your laughter no longer filled my home, your wicked high jinks no longer made me crazy. Until I stood in that damned club and knew, without you by side, my life was as empty as my bed was without you in it. I didn't know what love was, until I saw my refusal to admit it drown all the sweet innocence in your eyes. I love you. — Lora Leigh

Very often what happens in a local church today is that differences grow around personalities (either from within the church fellowship or from the wider church) and then become articulated around matters of doctrinal dispute. There may well be genuine theological disagreement, but the 'strife' emerges because personal relationships are not good. When the love of God is truly controlling such relationships within a church, areas of disagreement find their proper perspective and do not necessitate 'strife', let alone 'schism'.3 So-called 'clashes of personality' often, on analysis, are nothing much more than a failure, or even a refusal, to let God's love change us in our attitudes to one another. We allow theological differences (instead of the love of God) to determine the quality, openness and depth of our relationships. — David Prior

It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in, God.
He only has to refuse his ultimate love to everything that is not God.
This refusal does not presuppose any belief.
It is enough to recognize what is obvious to any mind:
that all the goods of this world, past, present, and future, real or imaginary,
are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying
the desire that perpetually burns within us
for an infinite and perfect good. — Simone Weil

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth — Raoul Vaneigem

You and I will converse while Hunt has a cigar," Westcliff informed him. "Come with us."
The "invitation" didn't seem to allow the possibility of a refusal, but Matthew tried nonetheless. "Thank you, my lord, but there is a certain matter I wish to discuss with someone, and I - "
"That someone would be Mr. Bowman, I expect."
Hell, Matthew thought. He knows. Even if it hadn't been for those words, he could tell by the way Westcliff was looking at him.
Westcliff knew about Bowman's intention of marrying him off to Daisy ... and not surprisingly, Westcliff had an opinion about it.
"You will discuss the matter with me first," the earl continued.
Matthew glanced warily at Simon Hunt, who gave him a bland look in return. "I'm certain," Matthew said, "that Mr. Hunt doesn't want to be bored by a discussion of someone else's personal affairs - "
"Not at all," Hunt said cheerfully. "I love hearing about other people's affairs. Particularly when they're personal. — Lisa Kleypas

God doesn't give up. His love is greater than our refusal to listen. - Richard Holland - — Gary Chapman

The refusal to be creative is an act of self-will and is counter to our true nature. When we are open to our creativity, we are opening to God: good, orderly direction. As we pursue our creative fulfillment, all elements of our life move toward harmony. As we strengthen our creativity, we strengthen our connection to the Creator within. Artists love other artists. Our relationship to God is co-creative, artist to artist. It is God's will for us to live in creative abundance. — Julia Cameron

And there's also 'To him that hath shall be given.' After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can't give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity. — C.S. Lewis

How does one undermine the framework of racial reasoning? By dismantling each pillar slowly and systematically. The fundamental aim of this undermining and dismantling is to replace racial reasoning with moral reasoning, to understand the black freedom struggle not as an affair of skin pigmentation and racial phenotype but rather as a matter of ethical principles and wise politics, and to combat the black nationalist attempt to subordinate the issues and interests of black women by linking mature black self-love and self-respect to egalitarian relations within and outside black communities. The failure of nerve of black leadership is its refusal to undermine and dismantle the framework of racial reasoning. — Cornel West

Love is just a contact of no refusal. — Sol Michael

But it isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of every emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it's a half-love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.
It is possible that in order to keep love, feeling, tenderness alive, it will be necessary to feel these emotions ambiguously, even for what is false and debased, or for what is still an idea, a shadow in the willed imagination only ... or if what we feel is pain, then we must feel it, acknowledging that the alternative is death. Better anything than the shrewd, the calculated, the non-committal, the refusal of giving for fear of the consequences ... — Doris Lessing

The noblest relationship is marriage, that is, love. Its nobility resides in its altruism, the desire to serve another beyond all the pleasures of the relationship; and in its refusal ever to regard the other as a thing, an object, a utilizability. Sex is an exchange of pleasures, of needs; love is a giving without return. It is this giving without return, this helping without reward, this surplus of pure good, that identifies the uniqueness of man as well as the true nature of the true marriage. This is the quintessence the great alchemy of sex is for. — John Fowles

Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly. — Jane Austen

The Lord commands the wife to be submissive. Refusal to submit to the husband is therefore rebellion against God Himself. Submission to the husband is a test of her love for God as well as a test of love for her husband. The wife then must look upon her submission to her husband as an act of obedience to Christ and not merely to her husband. — Wayne Mack

You will not mock me - and you will let me finish. I have owned and lost a kingdom, and I have battled death. I have been through all that, and I will not chase after you like some lovesick poet spouting verse. If you wish to call me yours, then you will have to act as if you are mine. On the front of surrender, there is no middle ground. — Nenia Campbell

Megan wanted to groan. "You guys are smothering me."
Braden leaned against the wall, watching it all, never speaking. Sexy and silent. Okay, so he had a few things going for him.
"Get used to it," Her father's voice brooked no refusal. "Until I leave this world, you are still my daughter and still under my protection."
"Protect Lance." She waved her hand at her smirking cousin. "He's in more danger than I am if he keeps pissing me off. Share the love, Dad. — Lora Leigh

[Knowing God] ... call it love, yes, only that can sound too emotional, or call it faith, and that can sound too cerebral. And what is it? Both, and neither ... [its] the decision to be faithful, the patient refusal of easy gratifications ... of Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane and on the cross, that bloody crown of love and faith. That is how I learn finally of a God who will not be fitted into my catergories and expectations ... the living truth too great for me to see, trusting that He will see and judge and yet not turn me away ... That is the mercy which will never give us, or even let us be content with less than itself and less than the truth ... we have seen the truth enacted in our own world as mercy, grace and hope, as Jesus, the only-begotten, full of grace and truth.. — Rowan Williams

I want to see your stockings," he growled. "The plain white ones."
Her lips parted, as if to make a refusal, and then she blinked. Her puzzled look only made her more adorable to him.
"Yes, I was driven demented in your closet." He bent down to kiss her. "I'm passionately in love with your hosiery. — Laura Kinsale

And, because in some hard core of me, in some stubborn trench of selfish refusal, I could not, even at ten years of age, surrender to anything or anyone, I fought that pain. I analysed its offensive, and found its lines of attack. It festered, like the corruption in a wound turned sour, drawing strength from me. I knew enough to know the remedy. Hot iron for infection, cauterize, burn, make it pure. I cut from myself all the weakness of care. The love for my dead, I put aside, secure in a casket, an object of study, a dry exhibit, no longer bleeding, cut loose, set free. The capacity for new love, I burned out. I watered it with acid until the ground lay barren and nothing there would sprout, no flower take root. — Mark Lawrence

Let no one persuade you of a single thing. Study your hunger and how to feed it. Trust in whatever sounds twist your viscera. Write in the cadences of first love, of second chances, of air raids, of outrage, of the hideous and the hilarious, of headlong acceptance or curt refusal. Make the bitter music of bumdom, the sad shanties of landlessness, cool at the equator and fluid at the pole. Set the sounds that angels make after an all-night orgy. Whatever lengthens the day, whatever gets you through the night. Make the music that you need, for need will be over, soon enough. Let your progressions predict time's end and recollect the dead as if they're all still her. Because they are. — Richard Powers

Faith in life, in oneself, in others must be built on the hard rock of realism; that is to say, on the capacity to see evil where it is, to see swindle, destructiveness, and selfishness not only when they are obvious but in their many disguises and rationalizations. Indeed, faith, love, and hope must go together with such a passion for seeing reality in all its nakedness that the outsider would be prone to call the attitude 'cynicism.' And cynical it is, when we mean by it the refusal to be taken in by the sweet and plausible lies that cover almost everything that is said and believed. But this kind of cynicism is not cynicism; it is uncompromisingly critical, a refusal to play the game in a system of deception. — Erich Fromm

The sacred rowan is a woman born long, long ago, a woman whose refusal to see love cost first her lover's life, then the lives of her family, her clan, her people.
But not her own life. Not quite.
In pity and punishment she was turned into an undying tree, a rowan that weeps only in the presence of transcendent love; and the tears of the rowan are blossoms that confer extraordinary grace upon those who can see them.
When enough tears are wept, the rowan will be free. She waits inside a sacred ring that can be neither weighed or measured nor touched. She waits for love that is worth her tears.
The rowan is waiting still. — Elizabeth Lowell

Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud - that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee - that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling - that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others — Ayn Rand

What I love about Indiana Jones is he always bites off slightly more than he can chew. The guy he's fighting is always slightly tougher than he is, but he just refuses to give up. And that's what makes Indiana Jones a hero: not his superpowers, but his refusal to be beaten. — Neil Cross

The same chemicals were used in the cooking as were used on the composition of her own being: only those which caused the most violent reaction, contradiction, and teasing, the refusal to answer questions but the love of putting them, and all the strong spices of human relationship which bore a relation to black pepper, paprika, soybean sauce, ketchup and red peppers. — Anais Nin

The simplest spiritual discipline is some degree of solitude and silence. But it's the hardest, because none of us want to be with someone we don't love. Besides that, we invariably feel bored with ourselves, and all of our loneliness comes to the surface.
We won't have the courage to go into that terrifying place without Love to protect us and lead us, without the light and love of God overriding our own self-doubt. Such silence is the most spacious and empowering technique in the world, yet it's not a technique at all. It's precisely the refusal of all technique. — Richard Rohr

Those who refuse His mercy satisfy His justice in another way. Without His mercy, they cannot love Him. Without love for Him they cannot be 'justified' or 'made just'. That is to say: they cannot conform to Him Who is love. Those who have not received His mercy are in a state of injustice with regard to Him. It is their own injustice that is condemned by His justice. And in what does their injustice consist? In the refusal of His mercy. We come, in the end, to this basic paradox: that we owe it to God to receive from Him the mercy that is offered to us in Christ, and that to refuse this mercy is the summation of our 'injustice'. Clearly, then, only the mercy of God can make us just, in this supernatural sense, since the primary demand of God's justice upon us is that we receive His mercy. — Thomas Merton

A refusal to believe that God loves us is the unbelief which destroys the soul. — Edward Norris Kirk

Into hate, into refusal, against hope and without fear — Lauren Oliver

Christian love is the only kind of love in which there is no rivalry, no jealousy. There is jealousy among the lovers of art; there is jealousy among the lovers of song; there is jealousy among the lovers of beauty. The glory of natural love is its monopoly, its power to say, 'It is mine. ' But the glory of Christian love is its refusal of monopoly. — George Matheson

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand. — C.S. Lewis

A singer who refused to sing, a friend who wasn't her friend, someone who was hers and yet would never be hers.
Kestrel looked away from Arin.
She swore to herself that she would never look back — Marie Rutkoski

You have made me ashamed of the wasted years. You have made me acknowledge that no darkness has ever been deep enough to extinguish my personal knowledge of love. And all around me in this world I see evidence of love. I see love. I see it in the human struggle. I see its undeniable penetration in all that humans have accomplished in their poetry, their painting, their music, their love of one another and refusal to accept suffering as their lot. — Anne Rice

The refusal to love is the only unbearable thing. — Madeleine L'Engle

Perhaps that is what love is
the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power. — Phyllis Rose

If I have refused to risk, I have in the self-same decision refused to love. And if indeed I have refused to love, tragically I have refused to live. And when will I realize that that in and of itself is an unacceptable risk. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Much popular self-help literature normalizes sexism. Rather than linking habits of being, usually considered innate, to learned behavior that helps maintain and support male domination, they act as those these difference are not value laden or political but are rather inherent and mystical. In these books male inability and/or refusal to honestly express feelings is often talked about as a positive masculine virtue women should learn to accept rather than a learned habit of behavior that creates emotional isolation and alienation ... Self-help books that are anti-gender equality often present women's overinvestment in nurturance as a 'natural,' inherent quality rather than a learned approach to caregiving. Much fancy footwork takes place to make it seem that New Age mystical evocations of yin and yang, masculine and feminine androgyny, and so on, are not just the same old sexist stereotypes wrapped in more alluring and seductive packaging. — Bell Hooks

She wanted to remind him, whether his family was there or not. She wanted. And wanted. And endured in her wanting: the damp seat, the dry chicken, more champagne, the headache the champagne brought, the midges, the chat, his failure, no refusal, to look, look at me, I caused a thunderstorm with my passion and I sit here shaking under my skin and you don't notice because you're trying so hard not to notice, but all the people at the table there are really only you and me and you know it, the air is charged with it, it's a heat, a hot wind, and Marina and Seely are a sham next to it, Annabel ceases to exist, is simply obliterated in the gale of it, this isn't a fantasy, not my imagination, I can tell by the way you lift your fork, by the set of your jaw, by that sixth cigarette you are smoking me, or would if you could; but how long can we sustain it, how long till eruption, till the storm returns again and they can all see what it is, what it really is? — Claire Messud

I lent only half an ear to those well-intentioned folk who say that happiness is enervating, liberty too relaxing, and that kindness is a corruption for those upon whom it is practiced. That may be; but in the world as it is, such reasoning amounts to a refusal to nourish a starving man decently, for fear that in a few years he may suffer from overfeeding. When useless servitude has been alleviated as far as possible, and unnecessary misfortune avoided, there will remain as a test of man's fortitude that long series of veritable ills, death, old age, and incurable sickness, love unrequited and friendship rejected or betrayed, the mediocrity of a life less vast than our projects and duller than our dreams; in short, all the woes caused by the divine nature of things. — Marguerite Yourcenar

Sin is a refusal to grow, a refusal to love, a refusal to get committed, to be concerned, and to take risks. — Anthony De Mello

Infinite Love is who we really are and who we refuse to be. This refusal is our most essential tension. — David Deida