We Can't Choose Who We Love Quotes & Sayings

The way I see Jesus has not changed much at all since I was a child, but my imprisonment and all that followed made me love Him even more. His being the Son of God makes sense to me, because I believe God to be loving, just, forgiving, and merciful. I also believe that He respects free will. After all, He has given it to us so that we can choose to love or hate Him, do good or evil. But is it fair for a loving God to sit on His throne in Heaven and let us struggle and suffer on our own? Would any good father abandon His children this way? It makes perfect sense to me that God decided to come among us, live like us, and die a horribly painful death after being tortured. This is a God I can love with all my heart. A God who sets an example. A God who has bled and whose heart has been broken. This is who Jesus is to me. I don't pretend that I understand the Holy Trinity. But I understand love and sacrifice. I understand faithfulness. — Marina Nemat

Those who choose to walk on love's path are well served if they have a guide. That guide can enable us to overcome fear if we trust that they will not lead us astray or abandon us along the way. — Bell Hooks

A game. That's all life is, that's all it feels like. Everyone waiting for their turn to spin the bottle or for the bottle to finally choose them. Who would you rather is real. We can be erased, that's real too. — Alexis Bass

When people pass on we must choose how to remember them. While our loved ones sleep for eternity we must carry on with our daily toil. We can elect to harbor adoration and love in our precious memories or cling to animosity and detestation. We can kindly remember our ancestors or continue to feel embedded enmity towards people who no longer walk this earth. Regardless the human frailties of the recently departed, it seems that we should aspire to clutch the best part of our ancestors being fast to our hearts. A book encapsulating a departed person's life has many pages; we must choose which chapters to treasure and what chapters to disregard or downplay. — Kilroy J. Oldster

For us who choose our dreams over our love the only thing we can do for love is perhaps to release the lock around our necks. Through that, the pain may vanish. — Ai Yazawa

The question of what we are can only be answered by ourselves. We each decide what we are by the life choices we make. How we were made, who are parents are, where we are from, the color of our skin, who we choose to love, all those things do not define us. Our actions define us, and will keep defining us until even after death. — P.C. Cast

Remember, couples come together out of an equal fear of intimacy. Our Enlightened Brains want to be intimate, but our Caveman Brains push against it, and so we search out pseudo-intimate relationships in an ultimately fruitless attempt to find true Connection. What's to be done? The Universe is always working for us and with us! Partners are the catalysts for each others' healing, growth, and spiritual evolution. We seek out, find, and love those people who cause us the most distress, but through our love we have this amazing opportunity to work on those barriers to intimacy that have prevented Connection. We can choose to heal the old traumas and live lives of incredible peace, spiritual prosperity, and enlightenment. — Carol Clark

We women, me and you. Tell me something real. Don't just say I'm grown and ought to know. I don't. I'm fifty and I don't know nothing. What about it? Do I stay with him? I want to, I think. I want ... well, I didn't always ... now I want. I want some fat in this life."
"Wake up. Fat or lean, you got just one. This is it."
"You don't know either, do you?"
"I know enough to know how to behave."
"Is that it? Is that all it is?"
"Is that all what is?"
"Oh shoot! Where the grown people? Is it us?"
"Oh, Mama." Alice Manfred blurted it out and then covered her mouth.
Violet had the same thought: Mama. Mama? Is this where you got to and couldn't do it no more? The place of shade without trees where you know you are not and never again will be loved by anybody who can choose to do it? Where everything is over but the talking?
- Violet Trace and Alice Manfred — Toni Morrison

Be careful who you choose as your friends because their bad habits can become your bad habits. Choose wisely ... we all have a choice in life. — Mimi Jenkins

Some people say they will not believe in anything they can't see. What a catastrophe to not have any faith at all! You live only less than a half of life, if you will only believe in the things that you can see. Life is lived by those who have much faith and believe in many unseen things. If you believe in nothing that you cannot see, think about how much there is that you choose to turn your face away from! You can't see your soul and you cannot prove that it exists, therefore if you call yourself one who believes in nothing unseen, then you will forever deny your soul its existence, for the existence of the soul dwells in love, trust, anger, passion, faith, belief, strength; the soul is forever nourished by things that are unseen! And so we have too many empty bodies walking around! Bodies with souls inside that are half-dead and dying. — C. JoyBell C.

The time has come to tell the truth. Again. There is no love without justice. Men and women who cannot be just deny themselves and everyone they choose to be intimate with the freedom to know mutual love. If we remain unable to imagine a world where love can be recognized as a unifying principle that can lead us to seek and use power wisely, then we will remain wedded to a culture of domination that requires us to choose power over love. — Bell Hooks

We are who we choose to be, so we cannot change our past nor predict our future, but we can live each day to the fullest by sharing love and laughter with friends and associates. — Irma Schettini Caiazzo

We can't choose who we love. I wish, more than anything, that we could. — Victoria Aveyard

I often feel the pressure, from my peers and others, to come out and "take a stand" on a moral or social issue. Typically, I refuse to do so, or at least I refuse to do so in a way that will please my critics. On so many of the hard and divisive issues of our times, I don't close my eyes. I do stand for something: I stand for love. For if Jesus came, not to condemn the world, but to redeem it, how can we who bear the Name respond any differently? Yes, what I believe about all these moral and social issues matters, without a doubt. But these beliefs mean nothing, if my first and consuming conviction is not love for those who are different and believe differently than me. We have a choice: We can choose to show how "right" we are, or we can choose to love. Sometimes, it is impossible to do both at the same time. — Ronnie McBrayer

Why do this to yourself? How does it make anything better?"
"It does not make anything worse."
"It makes you worse. Why can't you just ... do good things with it?"
Winter laughed against the strain of the delusion. "They all believe they are doing good." Her head fell to the side and she watched Scarlet with her bleary eyes. "My stepmother is not only powerful because the people fear her, she is powerful because she can make them love her when she needs them to. We think that if we choose to do only good, then we are only good. We can make people happy. We can offer tranquility or contentment or love, and that must be good. We do not see the falsehood becoming its own brand of cruelty ... who am I to presume what is good for others? — Marissa Meyer

After all, the Beatitudes don't tend to look a lot like modern Christianity. We choose a political team. We select a denominational preference. We hitch our cart to a branch of philosophy. Anyone that disagrees is quickly and succinctly judged, and simultaneously disregarded as worthless. Big problem with that approach. We are supposed to be loving those who don't agree with us to Jesus - and you can't love those whom you deem worthless. — Mark Steele

Even in the darkest night it's still within our power to hold to faith. We can still embrace hope. And although we may ourselves feel unloved we can still stand steadfast in our love for others and for God. All this is in our control. God gave us these gifts and he does not take them back. It is we who choose to discard them. — William Kent Krueger

Once," Fran says, settling against the worktable, folding her arms, "I knew this kid who very bravely and bossily came out of the closet when she was only fourteen years old. She told me then that we can't choose who we love. We just love the people we love, no mattter what anyone else might want for us. Wasn't that you? — Madeleine George

Song of elli (old age)
What is plucked will grow again,
What is slain lives on,
What is stolen will remain
What is gone is gone ...
What is sea-born dies on land,
Soft is trod upon.
What is given burns the hand -
What is gone is gone ...
Here is there, and high is low;
All may be undone.
What is true, no two men know -
What is gone is gone ...
Who has choices need not choose.
We must, who have none.
We can love but what we lose -
What is gone is gone. — Peter S. Beagle

Maybe none of us can choose who we love, Cas. None of the lucky ones, anyway. The only choice we have is how we serve that love. And Ethan's made his choice. What about you? Are you going to reject it, or make the best of what you've been given? — Vicki Keire

The call to faith, in this light, is not some test of a coy god, waiting to see if we "get it right." It is the only summons, issued under the only conditions, which can allow us fully to reveal who we are, what we most love, and what we most devoutly desire. Without constraint, without any form of mental compulsion, the act of belief becomes the freest possible projection of what resides in our hearts ... The greatest act of self-revelation occurs when we choose what we will believe, in that space of freedom that exists between knowing that a thing is, and knowing that a thing is not. — Terryl L. Givens

Love for others and respect for their rights and their human dignity, irrespective of who or what they are, no matter what religion - or none - that they choose to follow, will bring about real change and set in motion proper relationships. With such relationships built on equality and trust, we can work together on so many of the threats to our common humanity. — Mairead Corrigan

For though, outside the Exercises, we can lawfully and with merit influence every one who is probably fit to choose continence, virginity, the religious life and all manner of evangelical perfection, still in the Spiritual Exercises, when seeking the Divine Will, it is more fitting and much better, that the Creator and Lord Himself should communicate Himself to His devout soul, inflaming it with His love and praise, and disposing it for the way in which it will be better able to serve Him in future. So, he who is giving the Exercises should not turn or incline to one side or the other, but standing in the centre like a balance, leave the Creator to act immediately with the creature, and the creature with its Creator and Lord. — Ignatius Of Loyola

But for each person who is made happy by love, there will be many for whom it turns out to be a cause of regret. That is because it can be so fleeting; one moment it may take our breath away, the next it may leave us bereft. When it does that, love can be like a haunting, staying with us for year after year; we know that it is gone, but somehow we persuade ourselves that it is still there ... Nobody would choose to be in love like that, to hold on so strongly to something that was no longer there. — Alexander McCall Smith

Kitten,
Letting go of someone who owns your heart is hard.
Sometimes holding on to that person is even harder. I
know I'm not the easiest person to love, but you are.
I'ts not that I can't live without you; it's that I don't want to. There's a difference. We all make choices in life and I choose you.
My heart belongs to you. And I'm not asking for it back, even if you don't want it anymore. I'm just asking for the chance to have yours again. I promise I'll be more careful with it this time.
Love Always,
Jack — J. Sterling

It can be difficult to leave a long-term relationship, even when our inner-wisdom tells us it's time to let go. At this point, we can choose let go and endure the intense pain of leaving behind the familiar to make way for a new chapter in our life. Or we can stay and suffer a low-grade pain that slowly eats away at our heart and soul, like an emotional cancer. Until we wake up, one day and realize, we are buried so deep in the dysfunction of the relationship that we scarcely remember who we were and what we wanted and needed to be. — Jaeda DeWalt

Some say we can't choose who we fall in love with; love chooses us. Sometimes people fall for the complete antithesis of everything they believe they're looking for. — Alexandra Adornetto

When I had nothing more to lose, I was given everything. When I ceased to be who I am, I found myself. When I experienced humiliation and yet kept on walking, I understood that I was free to choose my destiny. Perhaps there's something wrong with me, I don't know, perhaps my marriage was a dream I couldn't understand while it lasted. All I know is that even though I can live without her, I would still like to see her again, to say what I never said when we were together: I love you more than I love myself. If I could say that, then I could go on living, at peace with myself, because that love has redeemed me. — Paulo Coelho

I knew this id who very bravely and bossily came out of the closet when she was only fourteen years old. She told me then that we can't choose who we love. We just love the people we love, no matter what anyone else might want for you. — Madeleine George

We can't choose who we fall in love with....but we can choose when to walk away.. — Unknown

I love the healing parable of Jesus and the blind man. As he went along he saw a man blind from birth, his disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned? This man or his parents, that he was born blind?" "Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life." We have been trained to think in terms of sin and punishment. These ideas disempower us by stressing that we are weak and wrong. The empowering way is to view trials as lessons and opportunities to choose differently. We can transcend the odious notion of being sinners cloaked in guilt, awaiting punishment. To access a spiritual solution to a problem involves focusing on the idea of a solution. — Wayne W. Dyer

It's not any easier. We can't choose who we fall in love with. Besides, there's nothing abnormal about two guys being together. Nature made you the way you are and me the way I am. We're already living normal lives. — Jay Bell

We pick and choose who to love. We pick and choose who to hate. We pick and choose our friends and ignore those that invade our space.
We pick and choose who should live. We pick and choose who should die. We pick and choose who we say hello to and ignore a dying loners cry.
We pick and choose who to be real to. We pick and choose to be fake to. We pick and choose who is worthy of our affections or beneath us or we can relate to.
We pick and choose our dreams. We pick and choose our destiny. We pick and choose what we think will bring out the best in me.
We pick and choose to reach the pinnacle. We pick and choose because of our power of choice. We sometimes pick and choose while never really considering the consequences of our voice. — Delaine Robins

Her essay about the wedding ring was short. Kerr wrote: "Things are just things - they have no power to hurt or to heal. Only people can do that. And we can all choose whether to be hurt or healed by the people who love us."
That was all.
And that was everything. — Jack Canfield

Tristan stepped away from me. No, Robbie, listen. If there were any other way to turn off her programming, I would tell you. Lisa wants to know what she really feels, free of the programming, and I think we should help her. The pills will still keep her a bit compliant until we get her weaned off of them, but at least we can turn off her compulsion to please me sexually. Then she can really choose who she loves. — A. Violet End

He knows me better than anyone ever has. Than anyone ever will again. I would have stopped it if I could have. But I've learned the hard way, we can't choose who we love. Love chooses us. Love doesn't care about what's convenient or easy or planned. Love has its own agenda and all we can do is get out of its way. — Amy Engel

When we understand who we are, and how our realities work, we can choose more consciously to shape our lives in an optimal way.
Knowledge of oneself is the very key to a happy life. Happiness is not something outside of our own consciousness that needs to be earned, and achieved. It is a choice that needs to be supported by positive actions. It is not enough to say that we want to be happy. Our desire of happiness, love and peace, needs to be supported by our state of being. — Raphael Zernoff