Love - Leo Buscaglia

1972 - (By 1984 it was in its 39th printing)

(I haven't finished entering the quotes from his book, so it is hard to tell from this page how good his book is, but I highly recommend it.)

Buscaglia led a free, non-credit class at the U. of Southern California in the 60's and 70's called the "Love Class." His book is an outgrowth of the class.

He opens with this introduction

In the winter of 1969, an intelligent, sensitive female student of mine committed suicide. She was from a seemingly fine upper middle class family. Her grades were excellent. She was popular and sought after. On the particular day in January she drove her car along the cliffs of Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, left the motor running, walked to the edge of a deep cliff overlooking the sea and leaped to her death on the rocks below. She left no note, not a word of explanation. She was only twenty.

I have never been able to forget her eyes; alert, alive, responsive, full of promise. I can even recall her papers and examinations which I always read with interest. I wrote on one of her papers which she never received, "A very fine paper. Perceptive, intelligent and sensitive. It indicates your ability to apply what you have learned to your 'real' life. Nice work!" What did I know about her "real" life?

I often wondered what I would read in her eyes or her papers if I could see them now. But, as with so many people in and situations in our life, we superficially experience them, they pass and can never be experienced in the same manner.

... I simply wondered what I might have done; if I could have, even momentarily, helped.

p 12 Reflecting love is like two mirrors-- leads to infinity.

p. 16 As experienced human beings we must certainly believe in one thing more than anything else--we believe in change. And so if you don't like where you are in terms of love, you can change it.

You can only give away what you have.

Then he says that love is more like something you share because when you share it you still have it. He says he could teach everything he knows and still know it.

Like smiles - you don't give it, you spread it, (like knowledge)

Academics don't like word "love" -- he says he has to make his speech title more academic sounding, like "Affect as a Behavior Modifier" when he gives talks on love to academics.

He says the word "love" is rarely found in psychology books or any other academic books.

"Love has really been ignored by the scientists."

p 17 He likes a book by Pitirim Sorokim called The Ways and Power of Love.

Samuelson added a chapter to his economics book called "Love and Economics." Later he says that Samuelson said "I know my colleagues at Harvard will say I have lost my mind. But I want them to know that I have just found it.

LB quotes Albert Schweitzer who says we are close together, but dying of loneliness.

p 18 He lists several characteristics of a loving person.

Characteristic 1 - A person who cares about himself. He says it is the most important one. He describes this person as someone who says "Everything is filtered through me, so the greater I am, the more I have to give. The greater knowledge I have, the more I am going to have to give. The greater understanding I have, the greater is my ability to teach others.." [I would add the happier I am, the more my own emotional needs are met, the more loving I will be able to be.]

p 19 If all of life is directed toward the process of becoming, of growing, of seeing, of feeling, of touching, of smelling, there won't be a boring second.

p 20 He says we are losing our uniqueness, we are not persuading people to discover and develop it. Then he has a few things to say about the educational system:

p 20 Education should be the process of helping everyone to discover his uniqueness, to teach him how to develop that uniqueness, and then to show him how to share it because that is the only reason for having anything.

Imagine what this world would be like if all along the way you had people say to you, "It's good that you are different. Show me your differences so that maybe I can learn from them." But we still see the processes again and again of trying to make everyone like everybody else.

p21 He talks about how the art teacher wants everyone to draw a tree the same way. If a boy who has climbed in a tree, and who sees it from a totally different perspective paints one his way she will cry out that he is brain damaged!

p 22 The Animal School

p 31 What did you learn today- fact/feeling or about life. He says make it a habit to ask self later. He says in the future intelligence and happiness will prevail, and that will be heaven.

Quote p 37

p 22

The Animal School

There’s a wonderful story in education that always amuses me. It’s called The Animal School. I always love to tell it because it’s so wild, yet it’s true. Educators have been laughing at it for years, but nobody does anything about it.

The animals got together in the forest one day and decided to start a school. There was a rabbit, a bird, a squirrel, a fish and an eel, and they formed a Board of Education. The rabbit insisted that running be in the curriculum. The bird insisted that flying be in the curriculum. The fish insisted that swimming be in the curriculum, and the squirrel insisted that perpendicular tree climbing be in the curriculum. They put all of these things together and wrote a Curriculum Guide.

Then they insisted that all of the animals take all of the subjects. Although the rabbit was getting an A in running, perpendicular tree climbing was a real problem for him; he kept falling over backwards. Pretty soon he got to be sort of brain damaged, and he couldn’t run any more. He found that instead of making an A in running, he was making a C and, of course, he always made an F in perpendicular climbing. The bird was really beautiful at flying, but when it came to burrowing in the ground, he couldn’t do so well. He kept breaking his beak and wings. Pretty soon he was making a C in flying as well as an F in burrowing, and he had a hellava time with perpendicular tree climbing.

The moral of the story is that the person who was valedictorian of the class was a mentally retarded eel who did everything in a half-way fashion. But the educators were all happy because everybody was taking all of the subjects, and it was called a broad-based education. We laugh at this, but that’s what it is. It’s what you did. We really are trying to make everybody the same as everybody else, and one soon learns that the ability to conform governs success in the educational scene.

p 127 Love always creates. It never destroys

He talks about all the problems in the world that seem impossible to solve and says...

The only question is, What can I do?

128 story of how he helped one Chinese refugee who then helped someone else who then helped someone else.

129 Love is illimitable, deep, infinite

Each day in which we become more observant, more flexible, more knowledgeable, more aware, we grow in love.

Other quotes

A loving person recognizes needs. p 43

He needs people who care, someone who cares at least about him, truly sees and hears him. ... perhaps just one person, but someone who cares deeply.

p 44 We need to be heard. Then example of teacher who doesn't pay any attention to student saying his father hit his mother.

This loving person is a person who abhors waste — waste of time, waste of human potential. How much time we waste. As if we were going to live forever. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leo_Buscaglia.

Buscaglia quotes

http://www.cybernation.com/quotationcenter/quoteshow.php?type=author&id=1441

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