Light is Love...

He is living whose sympathy is awake, and he is dead whose heart is
asleep.

Bowl of Saki, by Hazrat Inayat Khan

Commentary by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan:

Life's light is love; and when the heart is empty of love, a man is
living and yet not living; from a spiritual point of view he is dead.
When the heart is asleep, he is as though dead in this life, for one
can only love through the heart. But love does not mean give and
take. That is only a trade; it's selfishness. To give sixpence and
receive a shilling is not love. Love is when one loves for the sake
of love, when one cannot help but love, cannot do anything but love.

Most people will say, 'The other does not understand me.' But why
must there be this lack of understanding? What causes it? It is lack
of sympathy. No words can ever make a person understand. It is the
heart alone which can convey its full meaning to the other heart, for
there are subtle waves of sympathy, there are delicate perceptions of
feelings such as gratefulness, admiration, kindness, which cannot be
put into words. Words are too inadequate to explain the finer
feelings. It is the heart quality which can express itself fully, and
again it is the heart quality which can understand fully. Would it
therefore be an exaggeration to say that as long as the heart is not
awakened a man is as though dead? It is after the awakening of the
heart that a man begins to live.

Sympathy is an awakening of the love element, which comes on seeing
another in the same situation in which one has been at some time in
one's life. A person who has never experienced pain cannot sympathize
with those suffering pain... Sympathy is something more than love and
affection, for it is the knowledge of a certain suffering which moves
the living heart to sympathy.

That person is living whose heart is living, and that heart is living
which has wakened to sympathy. The heart void of sympathy is worse
than a rock, for the rock is useful, but the heart void of sympathy
produces antipathy. ... There are many attributes found in the human
heart which are called divine, but among them there is no greater and
better attribute than sympathy, by which man shows in human form God
manifested.