I loved the depth of insight about love from Henry Drummond’s short book The Greatest Thing In The World. This book dives into the definition of love that the Apostle Paul gives us in 1 Corinthians 13. To read my full review, and find the links for a free download of this book, please click here.

These are 11 of my favorite quotes from this book.

“Charity is only a little bit of love, one of the innumerable avenues of love, and there may even be, and there is, a great deal of charity without love. It is a very easy thing to toss a copper to a beggar on the street; it is generally an easier thing than not to do it. Yet love is just as often in the withholding. We purchase relief from the sympathetic feelings roused by the spectacle of misery, at the copper’s cost. It is too cheap—too cheap for us, and often too dear for the beggar. If we really loved him we would either do more for him, or less.”

“We hear much of love to God; Christ spoke much of love to man. We make a great deal of peace with heaven; Christ made much of peace on earth.”

“[Patience] is the normal attitude of love; love passive, love waiting to begin; not in a hurry; calm; ready to do its work when the summons comes”

“Love waives even self-satisfaction.” 

“Politeness has been defined as love in trifles. Courtesy is said to be love in little things.”

“The peculiarity of ill temper is that it is the vice of the virtuous. …No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not drunkenness itself, does more to unchristianize society than evil temper. For embittering life, for breaking up communities, for destroying the most sacred relationships, for devastating homes, for withering up men and women, for taking the bloom of childhood, in short, for sheer gratuitous misery-producing power this influence stands alone.”

“Souls are made sweet not by taking the acid fluids out but by putting something in—a great love, a new spirit, the Spirit of Christ. Christ, the Spirit of Christ, interpenetrating ours, sweetens, purifies, transforms all.”

“Willpower does not change men. Time does not change men. Christ does.”

“What we are stretches past what we do, beyond what we possess.”

“Never offer men a thimbleful of gospel. Do not offer them merely joy, or merely peace, or merely rest, or merely safety; tell them how Christ came to give men a more abundant life than they have, a life abundant in love, and therefore abundant in salvation for themselves, and large in enterprise for the alleviation and redemption of the world. Then only can the gospel take hold of the whole of a man, body, soul and spirit, and give to each part of his nature its exercise and reward. … Only a fuller love can compete with the love of the world.” 

“No worse fate can befall a man in this world than to live and grow old alone, unloving and unloved.”