I had heard about the bestseller, A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson many times, especially because it was always connected to A Course in Miracles but I had never actually taken the time to read it. Not until…well, not until I was called by it.
I was going through a very challenging time of my life both emotionally, spiritually and physically and my heart was longing for something more meaningful than any of the so-called “How to get over a breakup and love again…” content you find on the web.
A Return to Love
I was done with the surface stuff and needed something that would actually feed my Soul and help my heart heal. And there it was. I opened YouTube and A Return to Love, the audio version was staring at me. Again, I had heard about it but now it was different, it was calling for me and I answered the call.
I hit play and I couldn’t stop.
I would spend hours and hours listening to it and be in awe of how much simplicity the author was sharing, but at the same time, her words would profoundly touch my heart. So much so that I believe I’ve read and listened to the book 4 or 5 times. And every single time, I would take something different from it, new nuggets of wisdom that have stayed with me until this day.
This book opened gave me hope where there wasn’t much left and helped me open my mind and my heart once again to life, and of course, to love.
So without further a due, here is just a small part of this beautiful book that I wanted to share with you today, knowing that it will stay with you forever and will definitely make you want to read the book again and again.
38 Beautiful Quotes from A Return to Love that Made Me Want to Read the Book All Over Again
We are here to support, forgive and heal one another.
“We are not here to fix, change or belittle another person. We are here to support, forgive and heal one another.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“If I’m convinced that I’m not good enough, I will have a difficult time accepting someone into my life who thinks I am. It’s the Groucho Marx syndrome of not wanting to like anyone who would want me in their club. The only way that I can accept someone’s finding me wonderful, is if I find myself wonderful. But to the ego, self-acceptance is death.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“What the ego doesn’t want us to see is that our pain doesn’t come from the love we weren’t given in the past, but from the love we ourselves aren’t giving in the present. Salvation”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“Before the Prince can save the damsel in distress, he has to slay the dragons that surround her castle. So do we all. Those dragons are our demons, our wounds, our egos, our brilliant ways of denying love to ourselves and others. The ego’s patterns have to be rooted out, detoxed from our system, before the pure love within us can have a chance to come forth.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
The perfect you isn’t something you need to create.
“When Michelangelo was asked how he created a piece of sculpture, he answered that the statue already existed within the marble. God Himself had created the Pieta, David, Moses. Michelangelo’s job, as he saw it, was to get rid of the excess marble that surrounded God’s creation.
So it is with you. The perfect you isn’t something you need to create, because God already created it. The perfect you is the love within you. Your job is to allow the Holy Spirit to remove the fearful thinking that surrounds your perfect self, just as excess marble surrounded Michelangelo’s perfect statue.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“We think we’re powerful because of what we’ve achieved rather than because of what we are.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
When we fall in love, we see the total Truth in the one we love.
“When two people come together in God, the walls that appear to separate us disappear. The beloved doesn’t seem to be a mere mortal. They seem for a while to be something else, something more. The truth is, they are something more.
No one is anything less than the perfect Son of God, and when we fall in love, we have an instant when we see the total truth about someone. They are perfect. That’s not just our imagination.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“The love in one of us is the love in all of us. ‘There’s actually no place where God stops and you start,’ and no place where you stop and I start. Love is energy, an infinite continuum. Your mind extends into mine and into everyone else’s. It doesn’t stay enclosed within your body.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“Love in your mind produces love in your life. This is the meaning of Heaven. Fear in your mind produces fear in your life. This is the meaning of hell”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate but that we are powerful beyond measure.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. We ask ourselves who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous. Actually who are you not to be. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. And as we let our own light shine we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“Enlightened people don’t have anything we don’t have. They have perfect love inside, and so do we. The difference is that they don’t have anything else.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
A spiritual relationship is not necessarily one in which two people are above all else, authentic.
“A spiritual relationship is not necessarily one in which two people are smiling all the time. Spiritual means to be above all else, authentic. Real work can only occur in the presence of rigorous honesty We all long for that, but we’re afraid of communicating honestly with another person because we think they’ll leave us if they see who we really are.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“What we give to others, we give to ourselves. What we withhold from others, we withhold from ourselves. In any moment when we choose fear instead of love, we deny ourselves the experience of Paradise.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“A relationship is not meant to be the joining at the hip of two emotional invalids. The purpose of a relationship is not for two incomplete people to become one, but rather for two complete people to join together for the greater glory of God.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
The opposite of love is fear.
“The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.” When we think with love, we are literally co-creating with God. And when we’re not thinking with love, since only love is real, then we’re actually not thinking at all. We’re hallucinating. And that’s what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love. Fear is an illusion.
Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety and trauma are literally all imagined. That is not to say they don’t exist for us as human beings. They do. But our fear is not our ultimate reality, and it does not replace the truth of who we really are. Our love, which is our real self, doesn’t die, but merely goes underground.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“The goal of spiritual practice is full recovery, and the only thing you need to recover from is a fractured sense of self. If you don’t already believe it yourself, another person cannot convince you you’re okay.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
As we love, we shall be released from pain and as we deny love, we shall remain in pain.
“Whether we’re forgiving our parents or someone else or ourselves, the laws of mind remain the same. As we love, we shall be released from pain and as we deny love, we shall remain in pain.
Each of us have different fears and different manifestations of fear, but all of us are saved by the same technique: The call to God to save our lives by salvaging our minds. ‘Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. For love is the kingdom and love is the glory and love is the power, forever and forever.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“You’d think we’d have some compassion for ourselves, bound up in emotional chains the way we are, but we don’t. We’re just disgusted with ourselves because we think we should be better by now. Sometimes we make the mistake of thinking other people don’t have as much fear as we do, which only makes us more afraid.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“Knowing who you are and why you came here — that you are a child of God, and that you came here to heal and be healed — is more important than knowing what you want to do. What you want to do is not the important question. The question to ask is, “When I do anything, how should I do it”? And the answer is, “Kindly.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“When we choose to love, or to allow our minds to be one with God, then life is peaceful. When we turn away from love, the pain sets in. And whether we love, or close our hearts to love, is a mental choice we make, every moment of every day.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
Forgiveness is selective remembering.
“Forgiveness is “selective remembering”—a conscious decision to focus on love and let the rest go. But the ego is relentless—it is “capable of suspiciousness at best and viciousness at worst.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“It’s easy to forgive people who have never done anything to make us angry. People who do make us angry, however, are our most important teachers. They indicate the limits to our capacity for forgiveness. “Holding grievances is an attack on God’s plan for salvation.” ~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
The decision to let go our grievances against other people is the decision to see ourselves as we truly are, because any darkness we let blind us to another’s perfection also blinds us to our own. It can be very hard to let go of your perception of someone’s guilt when you know that by every standard of ethics, morality, or integrity, you’re right to find fault with them. But the Course asks, “Do you prefer that you be right or happy?”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
When your mind is filled with light, there is no room for darkness.
“We aren’t bodies at all; who we are is the love inside us, and it is that love alone that determines our value. When our minds are filled with light, there is no room for darkness.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“When infants aren’t held, they can become sick, even die. It’s universally accepted that children need love, but at what age are people supposed to stop needing it? We never do. We need love in order to live happily, as much as we need oxygen in order to live at all.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
You are responsible for what you think, because it is only at this level that you can exercise choice.
“You may believe that you are responsible for what you do, but not for what you think. The truth is that you are responsible for what you think, because it is only at this level that you can exercise choice. What you do comes from what you think. ”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“When we attach value to things that aren’t love—the money, the car, the house, the prestige—we are loving things that can’t love us back. We are searching for meaning in the meaningless.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we have learned here. The spiritual journey is the relinquishment—or unlearning—of fear and the acceptance of love back into our hearts. Love is the essential existential fact. It is our ultimate reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“The irony is that the opposite is true: available people are the ones who are dangerous, because they confront us with the possibility of real intimacy. They might actually hang around long enough to get to know us. They could melt our defenses, not through violence but through love. This is what the ego doesn’t want us to see. Available people are frightening. They threaten the ego’s citadel. The reason we’re not attracted to them is because we’re not available ourselves.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
The moment of surrender is not when life is over. It’s when it begins.
“The moment of surrender is not when life is over. It’s when it begins.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“Something amazing happens when we surrender and just love. We melt into another world, a realm of power already within us. The world changes when we change. The world softens when we soften. The world loves us when we choose to love the world.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“Surrender means, by definition, giving up attachment to results. When we surrender to God, we let go of our attachment to how things happen on the outside and we become more concerned with what happens on the inside.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“Success means we go to sleep at night knowing that our talents and our abilities were used in a way that served people. We’re compensated by grateful looks in other people’s eyes, whatever material abundance supports us in performing joyfully and at high energy, and the magnificent feeling that we did our bit today to help save the world.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
Healing occurs in the present, not the past.
“Healing occurs in the present, not the past. We’re not held back by the love we didn’t receive in the past, but by the love we’e not giving in the present. There’s a lot of talk today about people growing up in dysfunctional homes, but who didn’t grow up in a dysfunctional home?~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
This world is a dysfunction. However, there’s nothing we’ve been through or seen or done that cannot be used to make our lives more valuable now. We can grow from any experience, and we can transcend any experience.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“There’s a myth that some people are more faithful than others. A truer statement is that in some areas, some of us are more surrendered than others. We surrender to God first, of course, the things we don’t really care that much about anyway.
Some of us don’t mind giving up our attachment to career goals, but there’s no way we’re going to surrender our romantic relationships, or vice versa. Everything we don’t care that much about—fine—God can have it. But if it’s really, really important, we think we better handle it ourselves.
The truth is, of course, that the more important it is to us, the more important it is to surrender. That which is surrendered is taken care of best. To place something in the hands of God is to give it over, mentally, to the protection and care of the beneficence of the universe. To keep it ourselves means to constantly grab and clutch and manipulate. We keep opening the oven to see if the bread is baking, which only ensures that it never gets a chance to.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“Sometimes people think that calling on God means inviting a force into our lives that will make everything rosy. The truth is, it means inviting everything into our lives that will force us to grow—and growth can be messy. The purpose of life is to grow into our perfection. Once we call on God, everything that could anger us is on the way.
Why? Because the place where we go into anger instead of love, is our wall. Any situation that pushes our buttons is a situation where we don’t yet have the capacity to be unconditionally loving. It’s the Holy Spirit’s job to draw our attention to that, and help us move beyond that point.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
The return to love is hardly the end of life’s adventure.
“The return to love is hardly the end of life’s adventure. It’s the real beginning. A course in miracle says we think we have many different problems but we really only have one: denying love is the only problem and embracing it is the only answer.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“We’re all assigned a piece of the garden, a corner of the universe that is ours to transform. Our corner of the universe is our own life—our relationships, our homes, our work, our current circumstances—exactly as they are. Every situation we find ourselves in is an opportunity, perfectly planned by the Holy Spirit, to teach love instead of fear.
Whatever energy system we find ourselves a part of, it’s our job to heal it—to purify the thought forms by purifying our own. It’s never really a circumstance that needs to change—it’s we who need to change. The prayer isn’t for God to change our lives, but rather for Him to change us.”~ Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
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