Campus Voices
Thoughts On Love From Students, Faculty, and Professional Staff
As we celebrate Valentine’s Day today, and watch the Southern Virginia University Theatre Department’s production “Romeo and Juliet” on the stage, love is in the air and on our minds.
Love is all around us, and we express it in more ways than we realize. We show love for our family and our friends. We show love for our passions and pastimes. We show love for learning.
Here are some thoughts from around campus on the role of love in different aspects of our lives.
Professor Jeremiah John
“I think love has two sides. One side is impartial: it sees whatever is good and honors it. The other side is partial. It’s where you love one particular thing or person, and you want them to love you back. Sometimes I think the first, impartial side is better. It’s not right to love only your own friends. But I don’t think people can be happy without loving particular things, in a special way. Each person has her own parents, her own children, and her own country. In Exodus, God calls himself ‘jealous’, and there’s a hymn in which God says ‘I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have called you, and you are mine.’ In Orwell’s essay on Gandhi, he agrees with Gandhi that a perfect person would love everyone equally, but responds that ‘essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection’ ”.
Professor Amy Roskelley
“Sometimes it’s easy to love others or to love God, but it’s hard to let them love you back. It’s so easy to love others but we live in a society where we often don’t feel worthy of receiving love and that’s so wrong. Just by virtue of being a literal child of God we are worthy of being loved.”
Professor Wyatt Winnie
“To me, love, in terms of education and love of learning is the ability to cultivate a sense of wonder about the world around us. Exploring the world of ideas is an exciting journey that often brings clarity of mind, as well as peace and enlargement to the soul.”
Sarah Morrow
“Your goals should reflect what you love. So if you love soccer, your goals should help you improve in that field. If you love a person, your goals should help improve that relationship.”
Josh Ogden
“Love is the only thing that can make life worth living; it propels me out of bed and makes me appreciate beauty and want to create it. Without it, life would just be a thing and not a journey. Love is the only real thing in a world of frivolity.”
Chris-Anthony Collins
“Love is like faith. It doesn’t come overnight. It can grow, but it can also diminish if you don’t maintain and nurture it. Love is something you have to work for.”
Cynthia Stoddard
“Love to me means doing things for other people without expecting anything in return. When i want to show love to my husband, for example, I’ll do the dishes. For a while I would only do the dishes because they needed to be done, but now I do it because I love my husband.”
Alexis Brimhall
“To me, love is a verb, not a noun. Love isn’t something you have, it’s something you do. To love is to act, doing things both big and small to show others how you feel.”
Sarah Brezenski
“Love is chocolate cake.”
Nick Porter
“I have found that for me love is putting others first. I find the most joy in what I do when it has a positive effect on other people.”
Zach Shiraki
“Well, I feel like it’s really what life’s about, right? We’re governed by how much we ‘love’ any specific person, thing, or activity. It’s what causes us to be happy or sad or angry. That’s why I feel like the worst thing you can feel is nothing, because that means you have no love for anyone or anything. Love is what gives us meaning.”
Nathanael Rodriguez
“When it comes to the important things, love means that what you personally want doesn’t really matter any more, and you focus more on them.”