Chiefed from The Guideposts Treasury of Inspirational Classics:
The spectrum of love has nine ingredients:
Patience: Love suffereth long.
Kindness: And is kind.
Generosity: Love envieth not.
Humility: Love vaunteth not itself; is not puffed up.
Courtesy: Doth not behave itself unseemly
Unselfishness: Seeketh not its own.
Good temper: Is not provoked.
Guilelessness: Taketh not account of evil.
Sincerity: Rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth with the truth.
...these make up the supreme gift, the stature of the perfect man.
You will observe that all are in relation to [humanity],...life...the known today and the near tomorrow, and not to the unknown eternity. We hear much of love to God; Christ spoke of love to [humanity]. We make a great deal of peace with heaven; Christ made much of peace on Earth. Religion is not a strange or added thing, but the inspiration of the secular life, the breathing of an eternal spirit through this temporal world. The supreme thing, in short, is not a thing at all, but the giving of a further finish to the multitudinous words and acts which make up the sum of every common day...
'The greatest thing,' says someone, 'a man can do for his Heavenly Father is to be kind to some of His other children.' I wonder why it is that we are not all kinder than we are? How much the world needs it! How easily it is done! How instantaneously it acts! How infallibly it is remembered! How superabundantly it pays itself back--for there is no debtor in the world so honorable...as love. 'Love never fails.' Love is success, love is happiness, love is life.
'Love,' I say with Browning, 'is energy of life.'
For life, with all it yields of joy or woe,
And hope and fear,
Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love,--
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is.
Where love is, God is. He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God. God is love. Therefore love. Without distinction...calculation...procrastination, love...
You know the meaning of the word 'Gentleman.' It means...a man who does things gently, with love. That is the whole art and mystery of it. The gentle man cannot in the nature of things do...an ungentlemanly thing. The ungentle soul, the inconsiderate, unsympathetic nature, cannot do anything else. 'Love doth not behave itself unseemly.'...there is no greatness in things...the only greatness is unselfish love. Even self-denial in itself is nothing, is almost a mistake. Only a great purpose or a mightier love can justify the waste....Nothing is a hardship to love, and nothing is hard...
Good temper: The next ingredient is a very remarkable one: 'Love is not provoked.' We are inclined to look upon bad temper as a very harmless weakness...not a thing to take into very serious account in estimating a man's character. And yet, here, right in the heart of this analysis of love, it finds a place; and the Bible again and again returns to condemn it as one of the most destructive elements in human nature...it is the vice of the virtuous. It is often the one blot on an otherwise noble character...You know men...and women who would be entirely perfect, but for a...quick-tempered...disposition. This compatibility of ill temper with high moral character is one of the strangest and saddest problems of ethics. The truth is, there are two great classes of sins--sins of the body, and sins of the disposition...We have no balance to weigh one another's sins, and coarser and finer are but human words; but faults in the higher nature may be less venal than those in the lower, and in the eye of Him who is love, a sin against love may be seen as a hundred times more base. No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not drunkenness itself, does more to unchristianize society than evil temper...for sheer gratuitous misery-producing power this influence stands alone...Analyze, as a study in temper, the thunder-cloud itself as it gathers on the Elder Brother's brow. What is it made of? Jealousy, anger, pride, uncharity, cruelty, self-righteousness...sullenness--these are the ingredients of this dark and loveless soul. In varying proportions, also, these are the ingredients of all ill temper. Judge if such sins of the disposition are not worse to live in, and for others to live with, than the sins of the body. Did Christ indeed not answer the question Himself when He said, 'I say to you that the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of heaven before you'? There is really no place in heaven for a disposition like this. A man with such a mood could only make heaven miserable for all the people in it. Except, therefore, such a man be born again, he...simply cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.
--Henry Drummond, The Greatest Thing in the World
...The one great need in our Christian life is love, more love to God and to each other. Would that we could all move into that Love chapter, [1 Corinthians 13] and live there. --D.L. Moody
"So faith, hope, love abide, these three. But the greatest of these is love." --1 Corinthians 13:13
God is love.
Love is all you need.