Love Quote by Leo Buscaglia

Love, for Buscaglia, isn’t a feeling you possess; it’s a posture you practice. “Open arms” lands as both image and instruction: affection as welcome, not capture. The line’s quiet brilliance is how it smuggles a moral argument into everyday body language. You can picture the embrace, then you can feel the moment it turns into a grip. The quote draws a hard boundary between intimacy and control, insisting they’re not neighboring virtues but opposing instincts.

Buscaglia wrote as a popular humanist in an era when self-help began borrowing the language of therapy and translating it for mass audiences. The 1970s and ’80s were full of promises that the right technique could secure love, keep love, fix love. His counter-move is disarmingly simple: if your strategy is to “close your arms about love,” you’re already treating it like property. The punishment is psychological and poetic at once: you end up “holding only yourself.” Not just alone, but locked in a self-referential loop, gripping your own anxieties, your own need for certainty.

The subtext is a critique of possessiveness dressed up as devotion. Jealousy, surveillance, emotional bargaining, the subtle tightening that gets mislabeled as commitment: Buscaglia frames them as self-defeating. Open arms also implies risk; you can’t welcome without the possibility of being left. That’s the quote’s real demand. Love requires tolerance for uncertainty, and the courage to let it move freely, even when your instincts want to clench.