Beloved Quotes

“Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, "Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody." ... [My dark side says,] I am no good... I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the "Beloved." Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen

“Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.”
― Brennan Manning, Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

“Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise a stranger to others.”
― Brennan Manning, Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

“Maybe you had to leave in order to miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

“I will look for you in every lifetime and love you there.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“To ignore, repress, or dismiss our feelings is to fail to listen to the stirrings of the Spirit within our emotional life. Jesus listened. In John's Gospel we are told that Jesus was moved with the deepest emotions (11:33)... The gospel portrait of the beloved Child of Abba is that of a man exquisitely attuned to His emotions and uninhibited in expressing them. The Son of Man did not scorn of reject feelings as fickle and unreliable. They were sensitive antennae to which He listened carefully and through which He perceived the will of His Father for congruent speech and action.”
― Brennan Manning, Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

“Forget your voice, sing!
Forget your feet, dance!
Forget your life, live!
Forget yourself and be!”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Not knowing it was hard; knowing it was harder”
― Toni Morrison

“Like a child who saves their favourite food on the plate for last, I try to save all thoughts of you for the end of the day so I can dream with the taste of you on my tongue.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Speak to me: I will spend my lifetime trying to understand you.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“I am jealous of anyone who can make other people care so much.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“I am looking for the one I can’t fool.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“I couldn’t have dreamed you into existence because I didn’t even know I needed you. You must have been sent to me.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“ — This world is full of trouble, umfundisi.
— Who knows it better?
— Yet you believe?
Kumalo looked at him under the light of the lamp. I believe, he said, but I have learned that it is a secret. Pain and suffering, they are a secret. Kindness and love, they are a secret. But I have learned that kindness and love can pay for pain and suffering. There is my wife, and you, my friend, and these people who welcomed me, and the child who is so eager to be with us here in Ndotsheni – so in my suffering I can believe.
— I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi. For our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that he suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us how to bear suffering. For he knew that there is no life without suffering.
Kumalo looked at his friend with joy. You are a preacher, he said.”
― Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country

“It is part of the nature of every definitive love that sooner or later it can reach the beloved only in infinity.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“I will speak of love
until you go mad
and join me
in my mad worship
of love.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“We dance to seduce ourselves. To fall in love with ourselves. When we dance with another, we manifest the very thing we love about ourselves so that they may see it and love us too.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Our identity rests in God's relentless tenderness for us revealed in Jesus Christ.”
― Brennan Manning, Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

“I'm not here to grant you the extraordinary love you never had for yourself. I'm here, on my own accord, to love you. So that when you stare into my mirror eyes, you may see how extraordinary you are.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“While the impostor draws his identity from past achievements and the adulation of others, the true self claims identity in its belovedness. We encounter God in the ordinariness of life: not in the search for spiritual highs and extraordinary, mystical experiences but in our simple presence in life.”
― Brennan Manning, Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind."

Sixo”
― Toni Morrison

“The engaged mind, illuminated by truth, awakens awareness; the engaged heart, affected by love, awakens passion. May I say once more - this essential energy of the soul is not an ecstatic trance, high emotion or a sanguine stance toward life: It is a fierce longing for God, an unyielding resolve to live in and out of our belovedness. - pg. 152
”
― Brennan Manning, Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

“You know how it goes:
at some point in your life,
you fell in love with someone
and had a glimpse of God.
Then you abandoned life and lover
and started celebrating
your love for God.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“We seek the fire of the spark that is already within us.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“As Venus within Eros does not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at happiness. We may think he does, but when he is brought to the test it proves otherwise... For it is the very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“My Beloved

Know that my beloved in hidden from everyone
Know that she is beyond the belief of all beliefs
Know that in my heart she is as clear as the moon
Know that she is the life in my body and in my soul”
― Rumi, The Love Poems of Rumi

“Oh, beloved, and there is nothing but shadows
where you accompany me in your dreams
and tell me the hour of light.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“And then the sly arch-lover that he was, he said the subtlest thing of all: that the lover was nearer the divine than the beloved; for the god was in the one but not in the other - perhaps the tenderest, most mocking thought that ever was thought, and source of all the guile and secret bliss the lover knows.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“It's gonna hurt, now," said Amy. "anything dead coming back to life hurts.”
― Toni Morrison

“Nothing belongs to itself anymore.
These trees are yours because you once looked at them.
These streets are yours because you once traversed them.
These coffee shops and bookshops, these cafés and bars, their sole owner is you.
They gave themselves so willingly, surrendering to your perfume.
You sang with the birds and they stopped to listen to you.
You smiled at the sheepish stars and they fell into your hair.
The sun and moon, the sea and mountain, they have all left from heartbreak.
Nothing belongs to itself anymore.
You once spoke to Him, and then God became yours.
He sits with us in darkness now
to plot how to make you ours.” K.K.”
― Kamand Kojouri