"Love is life. And if you miss love, you miss life." -- Leo Buscaglia
Felice Leonardo "Leo" Buscaglia Ph.D. (31 March 1924 – 12 June 1998), also known as "Dr Love," was an author and motivational speaker, and a professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Southern California. He was a graduate of Theodore Roosevelt High School . After Navy service in World War II, Buscaglia entered the University of Southern California, where he earned three degrees before joining the faculty. Upon retirement, Buscaglia was named Professor at Large, one of only two such designations on campus at that time.
He gained fame on the USC campus through his non-credit course titled "Love 1A," which became the basis for his first book, titled simply LOVE. His dynamic speaking style was discovered by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and his televised lectures earned great popularity in the 1980s. At one point his talks, always shown during fund raising periods, were the top earners of all PBS programs. This national exposure, coupled with the heartfelt storytelling style of his books, helped make all of his titles national Best Sellers; five were once on the New York Times Best Sellers List simultaneously.
"A single rose can be my garden... a single friend, my world.""Change is the end result of all true learning.""Death is a challenge. It tells us not to waste time... It tells us to tell each other right now that we love each other.""Don't brood. Get on with living and loving. You don't have forever.""Don't smother each other. No one can grow in the shade.""I believe that you control your destiny, that you can be what you want to be. You can also stop and say, No, I won't do it, I won't behave his way anymore. I'm lonely and I need people around me, maybe I have to change my methods of behaving and then you do it.""I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate - it's apathy. It's not giving a damn.""I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things... I play with leaves. I skip down the street and run against the wind.""I've always thought that people need to feel good about themselves and I see my role as offering support to them, to provide some light along the way.""If I don't have wisdom, I can teach you only ignorance.""If we wish to free ourselves from enslavement, we must choose freedom and the responsibility this entails.""It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them.""Life lived for tomorrow will always be just a day away from being realized.""Love always creates, it never destroys. In this lie's man's only promise.""Love is always bestowed as a gift - freely, willingly and without expectation. We don't love to be loved; we love to love.""Love is always open arms. If you close your arms about love you will find that you are left holding only yourself.""Never idealize others. They will never live up to your expectations.""Only the weak are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong.""The easiest thing to be in the world is you. The most difficult thing to be is what other people want you to be. Don't let them put you in that position.""The fact that I can plant a seed and it becomes a flower, share a bit of knowledge and it becomes another's, smile at someone and receive a smile in return, are to me continual spiritual exercises.""Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.""We all need each other.""We are no longer puppets being manipulated by outside powerful forces: we become the powerful force ourselves.""What love we've given, we'll have forever. What love we fail to give, will be lost for all eternity.""What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.""Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.""Your talent is God's gift to you. What you do with it is your gift back to God."
Leo Buscaglia authored a number of New York Times bestselling inspirational books on love and human reticence, including The Fall of Freddie the Leaf, Bus 9 to Paradise, Living Loving and Learning, Love, Born for love, and My Father and "Loving Each Other". In lectures he often protested, in outrage at the comparative absence of writings on the subject, "I got the copyright for love!!!"
The Fall of Freddie the Leaf
The Fall of Freddie the Leaf is a short story by Buscaglia aimed at helping adults and children cope with the fear of dying. It relates the life story of a leaf as an allegory for the life cycle of people.
An even earlier (1973) published title is his The Way of the Bull charting his travels from Japan to Cambodia on a personal quest to learn the Asian symbol of life - The Bull. The meaning of the title originated in the 12th century Zen book, 10 Bulls by Chinese Zen master Kaku-an Shi-en (Kuo-an Shih-Yuan).
A little known fact is that Leo Buscaglia was divorced, despite his exhortations about love. He has stated "It was a very loving divorce". This has caused some controversy among the public.
While teaching at USC, Buscaglia was moved by a student's suicide to contemplate human disconnectedness and the meaning of life, and began a non-credit class he called Love 1A. His book and numerous recorded and televised lectures, some of which became available through PBS, became extremely well received. He argued that social bonds are essential to transcending the stresses of everyday life and enriching it above the limitations of poverty as well as crossing communication gaps between generations. His public lecture audiences, which numbered in the thousands, nearly always spontaneously formed a line after his talks in order to get books signed, and most importantly, to hug this outgoing speaker.
Buscaglia worked actively to overcome social and mental barriers that inhibited the expression of love between people, from family to acquaintances to people with disabilities, the institutionalized, and elderly, to complete strangers, often making his own forwardness on the subject a topic of self-deprecating humor. The profundity of his subject, however, almost invariably struck a responsive chord for many in an area frequently regarded as deficient in their lives, and by 1998 his books had reached eighteen million copies in print in seventeen languages.
