The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough is love.

The love we're too stingy to give

We live in a world that treats love like a luxury good—something to enjoy when we have the bandwidth, after we've handled "real" responsibilities. But most people, if they're honest, feel the pinch of this backwards thinking regularly. We want more affection, more attention, more genuine connection from the people around us. Yet we're often stingy with exactly those same things, operating under some unspoken belief that love is rationed, that showing it freely will somehow diminish our supply.

The practical truth is simpler and stranger: love actually grows when shared. A parent who struggles to say "I'm proud of you" often wishes their own parents had said it more. A friend who rarely initiates contact wonders why they feel lonely. We're not necessarily selfish—we're just caught in a scarcity mindset that doesn't match reality. Love isn't a finite pie that gets smaller when divided; it's more like a muscle that strengthens with use.

What makes this quote stick around isn't that it's profound philosophy. It's that it names something most of us experience as a quiet regret: the gap between how much closeness we crave and how much we actually risk expressing. The good news is that gap is entirely within our control.