Daily Inspiration Quote by Ralph W. Sockman

Love, in Sockman’s framing, isn’t a mood or a moral badge; it’s a vector. “Outreach” makes it kinetic and public-facing, a deliberate motion outward rather than a private feeling. “Of self” keeps the engine internal: the impulse begins in personal lack, not pure altruism. Then comes the provocation: “toward completion.” The line risks sounding self-serving until you notice its theological and civic logic. Sockman, a prominent American Protestant leader in the first half of the 20th century, spoke into a culture rattled by war, economic collapse, and the emerging mass society. In that environment, a purely sentimental definition of love would be useless. His version treats love as a disciplined practice that stitches fractured persons and fractured communities into something whole.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to two temptations: rugged individualism and performative charity. If the self is incomplete on its own, then isolation isn’t strength; it’s starvation. But if love is “outreach,” then it can’t stay in the realm of intentions or beliefs; it has to take the form of attention, responsibility, and risk. The phrase also dodges the sugary language that often hides power. “Completion” implies growth through relationship, not possession of another person. It suggests that love is less about finding someone to fill you up and more about becoming capable of a fuller humanity by moving beyond the fortress of the ego.

Sockman’s genius here is rhetorical economy: he makes love sound like the most practical kind of spiritual work.