The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread. ~Mother Teresa
Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love. ~Albert Einstein
There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved. It is God's finger on man's shoulder. ~Charles Morgan
You have to walk carefully in the beginning of love; the running across fields into your lover's arms can only come later when you're sure they won't laugh if you trip. ~Jonathan Carroll, "Outside the Dog Museum"
Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable. ~Bruce Lee
Life only starts when love comes. ~From the movie Bill of Divorcement, 1932
Tell me how many beads there are
In a silver chain
Of evening rain,
Unravelled from the tumbling main,
And threading the eye of a yellow star: -
So many times do I love again.
~Thomas Lovell Beddoes
What good is love if you never ask anything of it? ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy. ~George Jean Nathan
Love makes time pass; time makes love pass. ~French Proverb
True love stories never have endings. ~Richard Bach (Thanks, Bonnie)
The past is behind us, love is in front and all around us. ~Terri Guillemets
It is not that love is blind. It is that love sees with a painter's eye, finding the essence that renders all else background. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
I love you as you are, but do not tell me how that is. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
When you're attracted to someone it just means that your subconscious is attracted to their subconscious, subconsciously, so what we know as fate is two neuroses knowing that they're a perfect match. ~Jeff Arch, Nora Ephron, and David S. Ward, Sleepless in Seattle
Platonic love is love from the neck up. ~Thyra Smater Winsolow
The music may have stopped but my heart beats to another tune, this rhythm called love. ~A.C. Van Cherub
We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love. ~Tom Robbins
The eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love. ~Margaret Atwood
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. ~Rumi
Love! Immortality! it speedily became so hot in my breast, that I thought the geographers had misplaced the equator, and that it now ran directly through my heart. And from my heart poured out the feeling of love;—it poured forth with wild longing into the broad night. The flowers in the garden beneath my window breathed a stronger perfume. Perfumes are the feelings of flowers, and as the human heart feels most powerful emotions in the night, when it believes itself to be alone and unperceived, so also do the flowers, soft-minded, yet ashamed, appear to await for concealing darkness, that they may give themselves wholly up to their feelings, and breathe them out in sweet odours. Pour forth, ye perfumes of my heart, and seek beyond yon blue mountain for the loved one of my dreams! ~Heinrich Heine, "The Hartz Journey" (1824), Pictures of Travel, translated from German by Charles Godfrey Leland, 1855
Love is not a matter of what happens in life. It's a matter of what's happening in your heart. ~Ken Keyes
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. ~Lao Tzu
You really shouldn't say "I love you" unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget. ~Author unknown, attributed to an 8-year-old named Jessica
Some say that true love is a mirage; seek it anyway, for all else is surely desert. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
So dear I love him, that with him all deaths I could endure, without him live no life. ~John Milton
In the midst of pain and urgent trouble we can not realize the supreme happiness of being loved — sweetest and deepest of all meditations.... ~Byron Caldwell Smith, letter to Kate Stephens
Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold. ~Zelda Fitzgerald
For some it is love undeniably. For others it is making it work, never actually knowing what it is. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
Love is the law of life. ~Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Candle light, moon light, star light,
The brightest glow is from love light.
~Terri Guillemets
Men love because they are afraid of themselves, afraid of the loneliness that lives in them, and need someone in whom they can lose themselves as smoke loses itself in the sky. ~V.F. Calverton
Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty good too. ~Author unknown, attributed to an 8-year-old named Greg
What we seek in the end is not unconditional love but a love for which we, uniquely in all the world, meet all the conditions. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
Lust fades, so you'd better be with someone who can stand you. ~Alan Zweibel and Jessie Nelson, The Story of Us
Ah! a blessing beyond all fate
My sole mate 'tis my soul mate.
~Pixie Foudre
Love is a Mystery. You can't find it; it has to find you. ~Author Unknown
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved - loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves. ~Victor Hugo
Love is the greatest refreshment in life. ~Pablo Picasso
Your fortune is misfortune if it is not Love. ~Silent Lotus
Sometimes a couple stays together for the sake of the kids — two kids who pledged to be forever true. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. ~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1945
Love means nothing in tennis, but it's everything in life. ~Author Unknown
Love is what makes two people sit in the middle of a bench when there is plenty of room at both ends. ~Author Unknown
You see, I'd never stopped to wonder why it was that millions of boys all over creation weren't seeing her and instantly falling in love with her, worshipping her body and mind and soul and spirit as I did. It never occurred to me until this precise moment that maybe lots of boys wouldn't have thought she was gorgeous. Maybe she only seemed so gorgeous to me because - and this is the shocker - her face came alive when I walked in front of it. ~Author Unknown (I got this from Sassy magazine years ago but then lost the magazine - anyone know the attribution?)
Before you love, learn to run through the snow leaving no footprint. ~Turkish Proverb
What the world really needs is more love and less paper work. ~Pearl Bailey
Love is how you earn your wings. ~Karen Goldman
Love is when you can be your true self with someone, and you only want to be your true self because of them. ~Terri Guillemets
It is really one moment of looking love dead in the eye that takes us everywhere in a flash. ~Swami Chetanananda
Once a man has won a woman's love, the love is his forever. He can only lose the woman. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
Love, love, love - all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures. ~Germaine Greer
We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person. ~W. Somerset Maugham
We're all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness — and call it love — true love. ~Robert Fulghum, True Love
Before you pledge your undying love to someone, make them promise they won't die. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination. ~Voltaire
In a deep moment of love, thinking stops. The moment is so intriguing, the moment is so tremendously powerful, the moment is so intensely alive, that thinking stops. You are simply in awe, a great wonder surrounds you. ~Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs. ~William Shakespeare
There's no denying that the only real unhappiness in life is losing a man.... Death isn't nature's greatest mistake - falling in love is. If we didn't do that, all the misery in life would be cut right out of it. Oh my goodness, so would all the fun. So, what are you gonna do about it. ~When Ladies Meet, 1941 movie written by Rachel Crothers, John Meehan, Leon Gordon, S.K. Lauren, and Anita Loos, spoken by the character Bridgie Drake (not sure if this is also in the 1933 movie or 1932 play - anyone know?)
While God waits for His temple to be built of love, men bring stones. ~Rabindranath Tagore
Life can be hard but if you've got somebody to love — yeah! ~Terri Guillemets
Love is why I came here in the first place. ~John Denver
Your love has gone all through my body
like honey in water,
as a drug is mixed into spices,
as water is mingled with wine....
~Author Unknown
Love is metaphysical gravity. ~R. Buckminster Fuller
Love is my religion - I could die for it. ~John Keats
It is not necessary to be strong in every place if in the place you are vulnerable, you are loved. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
Love is the self-delusion we manufacture to justify the trouble we take to have sex. ~Dan Greenburg
Sunshine surrounds the earth as love surrounds our souls. ~Terri Guillemets
Love would never be a promise of a rose garden unless it is showered with light of faith, water of sincerity and air of passion. ~Author Unknown
Just because somebody doesn't love you the way you want them to, doesn't mean they don't love you with all they have. ~Author Unknown
If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular? ~Author Unknown
Anyone can catch your eye, but it takes someone special to catch your heart. ~Author Unknown
A man finds love and is satisfied. A woman finds love and insists on turning it into happiness. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
Love is missing someone whenever you're apart, but somehow feeling warm inside because you're close in heart. ~Kay Knudsen
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another. ~Henry Louis Mencken
Love knows no answer for it does not question. ~Silent Lotus
You learn to like someone when you find out what makes them laugh, but you can never truly love someone until you find out what makes them cry. ~Author Unknown
Sometimes we make love with our eyes. Sometimes we make love with our hands. Sometimes we make love with our bodies. Always we make love with our hearts. ~Author Unknown
True love is when you put someone on a pedestal, and they fall - but you are there to catch them. ~Author Unknown
You know when you have found your prince because you not only have a smile on your face but in your heart as well. ~Author Unknown
Love puts the fun in together, the sad in apart, and the joy in a heart. ~Author Unknown
There is a language of love, which is to say, a truth that does not tell all and a lie that does not deceive. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
Trip over love, you can get up. Fall in love and you fall forever. ~Author Unknown
The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. ~Thomas Merton
Love is not blind - it sees more, not less. But because it sees more, it is willing to see less. ~Julins Gordon
And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything as you like it, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose, and it's always daisy-time. ~D.H. Lawrence
Love is given to us as a time, but to keep it always, we must make it a place. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
To the world you might be one person, but to one person you might be the world. ~Author Unknown
No one has ever loved anyone the way everyone wants to be loved. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes
Be it in the garden, the nursery or the bedroom, a loving touch compensates for an unskilled hand. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
I guess, when you get down to it, a loving touch compensates for an unskilled hand about everywhere except in an airplane cockpit. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
I am so tired - so tired.
I see too many people,
Read too many books.
Do too many things.
I hate the theaters,
I hate my work,
I want you, - only you....
Come to me between the cool sheets
And let me burrow my head in your shoulder....
~Pauline Cohn, "Rest"
It's so easy to fall in love but hard to find someone who will catch you. ~Author Unknown
I'm far from perfect, but I'll be perfect for that imperfect person that's perfect for me. ~Amanda Bynes
Passion spins around love and I am dizzy around you always. ~Terri Guillemets
When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving oneself, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance. ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two. ~Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin
Love is the silent saying and saying of a single name. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
Come live in my heart and pay no rent. ~Samuel Lover
Romance is dead - it was acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenized, and sold off piece by piece. ~Lisa Simpson, The Simpsons
If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus. ~Emma Goldman, The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation
I but know that I love thee, whatever thou art. ~Thomas Moore
When I am gone, my love, do not look for me in the places we used to go to together. Look for me in the places we always planned to go to together. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
Love isn't blind, it's retarded. ~Don Foster and Susan Beavers, Two and a Half Men
Free love? as if love is anything but free. Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. ~Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love
Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion. ~Miguel de Unamuno
If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I. ~Michel de Montaigne
I don't wish to be everything to everyone, but I would like to be something to someone. ~Javan
Like I've always said, love wouldn't be blind if the braille weren't so damned much fun. ~Armistead Maupin, Maybe the Moon (Thanks, David)
Part of the reason that men seem so much less loving than women is that men's behavior is measured with a feminine ruler. ~Francesca M. Cancian
What I need to live has been given to me by the earth. Why I need to live has been given to me by you. ~Author Unknown
A heart that loves is always young. ~Greek Proverb
If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden. ~Claudia Ghandi
It's hard to defeat a woman in love. ~Terri Guillemets
Falling in love is so hard on the knees. ~Aerosmith
In true love the smallest distance is too great, and the greatest distance can be bridged. ~Hans Nouwens
Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages. ~Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Cities of the Plain, 1922
In springtime, love is carried on the breeze. Watch out for flying passion or kisses whizzing by your head. ~Terri Guillemets
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost. ~G.K. Chesterton
I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each other's dreams, we can play together all night. ~Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else. ~George Bernard Shaw
The simple lack of her is more to me than others' presence. ~Edward Thomas
[W]hen you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. ~Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally
Ah me! love can not be cured by herbs. ~Ovid
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. ~Eric Fromm
Love has no desire but to fulfill itself. To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving. ~Kahlil Gibran
Infatuation is when you think he's as sexy as Robert Redford, as smart as Henry Kissinger, as noble as Ralph Nader, as funny as Woody Allen, and as athletic as Jimmy Conners. Love is when you realize that he's as sexy as Woody Allen, as smart as Jimmy Connors, as funny as Ralph Nader, as athletic as Henry Kissinger and nothing like Robert Redford - but you'll take him anyway. ~Judith Viorst, Redbook, 1975
Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species. ~W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook, 1949
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939, translated from French by Lewis Galantière
When love is not madness, it is not love. ~Pedro Calderon de la Barca
Let your love be like the misty rains, coming softly, but flooding the river. ~Malagasy Proverb
Do I love you because you're beautiful,
Or are you beautiful because I love you?
~Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Cinderella
For you see, each day I love you more
Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.
~Rosemonde Gerard
Forget love - I'd rather fall in chocolate! ~Sandra J. Dykes
Love is much like a wild rose, beautiful and calm, but willing to draw blood in its defense. ~Mark Overby
Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end. ~Author Unknown
Love - a wildly misunderstood although highly desirable malfunction of the heart which weakens the brain, causes eyes to sparkle, cheeks to glow, blood pressure to rise and the lips to pucker. ~Author Unknown
Love is a sweet tyranny, because the lover endureth his torments willingly. ~Proverb
The lover is a monotheist who knows that other people worship different gods but cannot himself imagine that there could be other gods. ~Theodor Reik, Of Love and Lust, 1957
Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit. ~Peter Ustinov
Hate leaves ugly scars, love leaves beautiful ones. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
~William Shakespeare, Mid-Summer Night's Dream, 1595
The art of love... is largely the art of persistence. ~Albert Ellis
Love one another and you will be happy. It's as simple and as difficult as that. ~Michael Leunig
Who would give a law to lovers? Love is unto itself a higher law. ~Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, A.D. 524
Who, being loved, is poor? ~Oscar Wilde
Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame. ~Henry David Thoreau
To find someone who will love you for no reason, and to shower that person with reasons, that is the ultimate happiness. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
Without love, what are we worth? Eighty-nine cents! Eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely. ~Laurence Marks, M*A*S*H, "Love Story," original air date 7 January 1973, spoken by the character Hawkeye
A baby is born with a need to be loved - and never outgrows it. ~Frank A. Clark
Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own. ~Robert Heinlein
The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough. ~George Moore
We loved with a love that was more than love. ~Edgar Allan Poe
If I love you, what business is it of yours? ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire. ~François Duc de La Rochefoucauld
My debt to you, Belovèd,
Is one I cannot pay
In any coin of any realm
On any reckoning day.
~Jessie B. Rittenhouse
We choose those we like; with those we love, we have no say in the matter. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but to hold hands. ~Quoted by Alexandra Penney in Self
Love is, above all, the gift of oneself. ~Jean Anouilh
When a man is in love or in debt, someone else has the advantage. ~Bill Balance
Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly. ~Rose Franken
Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat. ~Ben Hecht
A bell is no bell 'til you ring it,
A song is no song 'til you sing it,
And love in your heart
Wasn’t put there to stay -
Love isn’t love
'Til you give it away.
~Oscar Hammerstein, Sound of Music, "You Are Sixteen (Reprise)"
(Thanks, Krystel)
Love is like dew that falls on both nettles and lilies. ~Swedish Proverb
Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity. ~Henry Van Dyke
Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident, a tight girdle, a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia. ~Judith Viorst, Redbook, 1975
Passion makes the world go round. Love just makes it a safer place. ~Ice T, The Ice Opinion, quoted in Reader's Digest, "Quotable Quotes," February 2002
Love is no respecter of age or practicality
Neither morality: unabashed
She enters where she will
Unheeding that her immortal fires
Burn up human hearts...
~Phillip Pulfrey, from Beyond Me, www.originals.net
Love is an ocean of emotions entirely surrounded by expenses. ~Lord Dewar
When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks. ~Natalie Clifford Barney
Only in love are unity and duality not in conflict. ~Rabindranath Tagore
It is astonishing how little one feels alone when one loves. ~John Bulwer
'Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark our coming, and look brighter when we come. ~Lord Byron
A hundred hearts would be too few
To carry all my love for you.
~Author Unknown
Love is the thing that enables a woman to sing while she mops up the floor after her husband has walked across it in his barn boots. ~Author unknown, as printed in The Hoosier Farmer
You know you have found love when you can't find your way back. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke. ~Lynda Barry
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love's tragedies. ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
Love cures people—both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it. ~Karl Menninger
If grass can grow through cement, love can find you at every time in your life. ~Cher
Love is staying up all night with a sick child - or a healthy adult. ~David Frost
Love doesn't sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all of the time, made new. ~Ursula K. Le Guin
Love is not singular except in syllable. ~Marvin Taylor
Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old. ~John Ciardi
People who are sensible about love are incapable of it. ~Douglas Yates
While duty measures the regard it owes
With scrupulous precision and nice justice,
Love never reasons, but profusely gives,
Gives, like a thoughtless prodigal, its all,
And trembles then, lest it has done too little.
~Hannah More
Ah me! why may not love and life be one? ~Henry Timrod
Take away love and our earth is a tomb. ~Robert Browning
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. ~William Shakespeare, "Sonnet CXVI"
He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began. ~Leo Tolstoy
It is the same in love as in war; a fortress that parleys is half taken. ~Marguerite de Valois
A joyful heart is the inevitable result of a heart burning with love. ~Mother Teresa
You don't have to go looking for love when it's where you come from. ~Werner Erhard
Sometimes the shortest distance between two points is a winding path walked arm in arm. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
No one can understand love who has not experienced infatuation. And no one can understand infatuation, no matter how many times he has experienced it. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
Love me and the world is mine. ~David Reed
It would be impossible to "love" anyone or anything one knew completely. Love is directed towards what lies hidden in its object. ~Paul Valéry, Tel quel, 1943
The love game is never called off on account of darkness. ~Tom Masson
They who meet on an April night are forever lost in love, if there's moonlight all about and there's no moon above. ~E.Y. "Yip" Harburg and Fred Saidy, dialogue just before the song "Old Devil Moon" in the musical Finian's Rainbow (Thanks, Katherine!)
Sometimes it's a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence. ~David Byrne
Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired. ~Robert Frost
You know you're in love when you don't want to fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams. ~Dr. Seuss
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place. ~Zora Neale Hurston
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. ~Emily Brontë
The excesses of love soon pass, but its insufficiencies torment us forever. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
An old man in love is like a flower in winter. ~Portuguese Proverb
Will you love me in December as you do in May,
Will you love me in the good old fashioned way?
When my hair has all turned gray,
Will you kiss me then and say,
That you love me in December as you do in May?
~James J. Walker
I don't think you can keep someone you truly love at arm's length on purpose, they'll always end up in your arms. ~Holly Nichole Miller
Love unlocks doors and opens windows that weren't even there before. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane. ~Honoré de Balzac
Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited where its votaries live in confidence, equality and unreserve. ~Percy Bysshe Shelley
Love is the poetry of the senses. ~Honoré de Balzac
Love is a game that two can play and both win. ~Eva Gabor
Without love, the rich and poor live in the same house. ~Author Unknown
The heart is a small thing, but desireth great matters. It is not sufficient for a kite's dinner, yet the whole world is not sufficient for it. ~Francis Quarles, Emblems
Love is like those second-rate hotels where all the luxury is in the lobby. ~Paul-Jean Toulet
We don't believe in rheumatism and true love until after the first attack. ~Marie Ebner Von Eschenbach, Aphorism
We picture love as heart-shaped because we do not know the shape of the soul. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
All love is probationary, a fact which frightens women and exhilarates men. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen. ~François, duc de La Rochefoucauld
Some women love only what they can hold in their arms; others, only what they can't. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
Love, and a cough, cannot be hid. ~George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, 1651
Desire creates havoc when it is the only thing between two people, or when it is what's missing. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
Poetry spills from the cracks of a broken heart, but flows from one which is loved. ~Christopher Paul Rubero
A man is not where he lives, but where he loves. ~Latin Proverb
The arms of love encompass you with your present, your past, your future, the arms of love gather you together. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Southern Mail, 1929, translated from French by Curtis Cate
Be everything with so much love in your heart that you would never want to do it any other way. ~Amrit Desai
I need the starshine of your heavenly eyes,
After the day's great sun.
~Charles Hanson Towne
A lover is a man who tries to be more amiable than it is possible for him to be. ~Nicholas de Chamfort
Love is not consolation. It is light. ~Friedrich Nietzsche
True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked. ~Erich Segal
A loving heart is the truest wisdom. ~Charles Dickens
Love is the greatest touch-up artist of all. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. ~Fyodor Dostoevski
[T]here is no hope for us in this painful, mysterious world save in giving ourselves to love. ~Byron Caldwell Smith, letter to Kate Stephens
Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze. ~Elinor Glyn
True love, to whom my heart is prey,
How dost thou hold me in thy sway,
That in each day I find no fault
But daily wait for love's assault.
~Pernette du Guillet
A good speech has a beginning, a middle and an end, the best example being, "I love you." ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self. ~William Butler Yeats
Mumps, measles, and puppy love are terrible after twenty. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
Smiles escape from clouds above and angels ring a chorus of your love. ~Daniel, @blindedpoet
You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving. ~Author Unknown
Love is what you've been through with somebody. ~James Thurber, quoted in Life magazine, 1960
Love is being stupid together. ~Paul Valery
In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love. ~Charles Baudelaire
Open your heart and take us in,
Love - love and me.
~W.E. Henley
On a cloudy night, when nothing seems above, still, there is love. Always love. For something, from someone. It's never done. Never. ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com
Before I met my husband, I'd never fallen in love. I'd stepped in it a few times. ~Rita Rudner
Fall not in love therefore; it will stick to your face. ~Tony Hendra, "Deteriorata"
Love does not care to define and is never in a hurry to do so. ~Charles du Bos
Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration. ~D.H. Lawrence
What an infinity of bliss the possession of your love seemed to me — the future so full of passionate sweet life that my spirit shrank blinded from trying to explore it; I stopped content with the delicious sense of that moment alone. ~Byron Caldwell Smith, letter to Kate Stephens
Love is an electric blanket with somebody else in control of the switch. ~Cathy Carlyle
I love you like crazy, baby
'Cuz I'd go crazy without you.
~Pixie Foudre
What "love" is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another. ~William Carlos Williams
I learned the real meaning of love. Love is absolute loyalty. People fade, looks fade, but loyalty never fades. You can depend so much on certain people, you can set your watch by them. And that's love, even if it doesn't seem very exciting. ~Sylvester Stallone
Ah, lady, when I gave my heart to thee,
It passed into thy lifelong regency.
~Gilbert Parker
The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of. ~Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670
At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet. ~Plato
As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words. ~William Shakespeare
It's love that makes the world go round!
W.S. GILBERT, Iolanthe
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, Sonnets from the Portuguese
Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections, as leaves are to the life of trees. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, American Note-Books, Mar. 9, 1853
Love -- bittersweet, irrepressible -- loosens my limbs and I tremble.
SAPPHO, To Atthis
Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.
D.H. LAWRENCE
Among the blessings of love there is hardly one more exquisite than the sense that in uniting the beloved life to ours we can watch over its happiness, bring comfort where hardship was, and over memories of privation and suffering open the sweetest fountains of joy.
GEORGE ELIOT, Daniel Deronda
Love is an alchemist that can transmute poison into food.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
ANAIS NIN, Parted Lips: Lesbian Love Quotes Through the Ages
Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Invisible Monsters
Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense.
HELEN ROWLAND
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.
RAINER MARIA RILKE, Letters to a Young Poet
When one loves somebody everything is clear -- where to go, what to do -- it all takes care of itself and one doesn't have to ask anybody about anything.
MAXIM GORKY, Jerry Dorsman's How to Achieve Peace of Mind
Friendship often ends in love; but love in friendship - never.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
As love is the most noble and divine passion of the soul, so is it that to which we may justly attribute all the real satisfactions of life, and without it, man is unfinished, and unhappy.
APHRA BEHN, The Fair Jilt
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
BIBLE, Leviticus 19:18
They do not love that do not show their love.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Love is jealous that any should come before her, or after. She would be all in all. If a man will trust her and live in her, he shall know all things.
JENNETTE LEE, The Ibsen Secret
Love--that divine fire which was made to light and warm the temple of home--sometimes burns at unholy altars.
HORACE MANN, Thoughts
Love will not serve those who do not live for her, and in her, and to whom she is not the breath of life.
JENNETTE LEE, The Ibsen Secret
Love ceases to be a pleasure, when it ceases to be a secret.
APHRA BEHN, The Lover's Watch, Four o'clock
Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This disease is prevailent [sic] only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient.
AMBROSE BIERCE, The Devil's Dictionary
That feelings of love and hate make rational judgments impossible in public affairs, as in private affairs, we can clearly enough see in others, though not so clearly in ourselves.
HERBERT SPENCER, The Study of Sociology
Love is blind.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
Love your enemies.
BIBLE, Matthew 5:44
Love is the wine of existence. When you have taken that, you have taken the most precious drop that there is in the cluster.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?
LILY TOMLIN, Parted Lips: Lesbian Love Quotes Through the Ages
Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,
'Tis woman's whole existence.
LORD BYRON, Don Juan
We don't believe in rheumatism and true love until after the first attack.
MARIE VON EBNER-ESCHENBACH, Aphorism
Love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.
HERMANN HESSE, Peter Camenzind
Love fattens on smooth words.
KATHARINE HEPBURN, Me: Stories of My Life
A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills: to know that high initiation, she must often tread where it is hard to tread, and feel the chill air, and watch through darkness. It is not true that love makes things easy: it makes us choose what is difficult.
GEORGE ELIOT, Felix Holt
The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can never end.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Love, such as it is in society, is only the exchange of two fantasies, and the contact of two bodies.
SEBASTIEN R.N. CHAMFORT, Maximes et pensées
The course of true love never did run smooth.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, A Midsummer Night's Dream
Love is eternal as long as it lasts.
VINICIUS DE MORAIS
Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing there trembling? Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is its beauty.... People with no imagination feed it with sex -- the clown of love. They don't know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that -- softly, without props.
TONI MORRISON, Love
It is the plain women who know about love; the beautiful women are too busy being fascinating.
KATHARINE HEPBURN, Evan Esar's 20,000 Quips & Quotes
Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God.
TONI MORRISON, Paradise
Love's tongue is in the eyes.
PHINEAS FLETCHER, Piscatory Eclogues
At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I'd quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER, Animal Dreams
Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby- awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.
DANIEL HANDLER (as Lemony Snicket), Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
It must be sad to outlive aught we love.
GEORGE ELIOT, The Spanish Gypsy
Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly.
LEO TOLSTOY, War and Peace
The greatest pleasures of love are inseparable from its greatest pains: Love has the face of a goddess, but the talons of a lion.
IVAN PANIN, Thoughts
Love will have its day.
BONO, "North and South of the River"
Have you heard the word is love?
It’s so fine, it’s sunshine.
THE BEATLES, The Word
Everyone has a right to love and be loved, and nobody on this earth has the right to tell anyone that their love for another human being is morally wrong.
BARBRA STREISAND, The Advocate, Aug. 17, 1999
Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.
WILLIAM BLAKE, Songs of Experience
Love means not ever having to say you're sorry.
ERICH SEGAL, Love Story
There is a comfort in the strength of love;
'Twill make a thing endurable, which else
Would overset the brain, or break the heart.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, Michael
Let me prevail as of old, as lover, as lord, as king, or have done with Love's tyrant rule.
WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT, To Nimue
True love is a durable fire,
In the mind ever burning.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH, As Ye Came from the Holy Land
Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.
JOHN DONNE, The Ecstasy
Some meet love's dreams when kissed by death,
And some again in youth,
But all have felt the quickening breath
Of love's undying truth.
EDWIN LEIBFREED, "Love's Dreams"
We can't profess love without talking through hand puppets.
DAVID SEDARIS, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
VICTOR HUGO, Les Misérables
Love's wing moults when caged and captured,
Only free, he soars enraptured.
THOMAS CAMPBELL, Freedom and Love
Love does nothing but make you weak! It turns you into an object of pity and derision--a mewling pathetic creature no more fit to live than a worm squirming on the pavement after a hard summer rain.
TERESA MEDEIROS, The Vampire Who Loved Me
True love begins in heaven's bower,
Unfolds on earth a perfect flower.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON, "Love's Language"
Love ... like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another's heart, or its flame burns low.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Love's fire colors once our neutral form, to blacken to eternal embers.
ELISE PUMPELLY CABOT, "Arizona"
Love is such a simple thing when we have only one-and-twenty summers and a sweet girl of seventeen trembles under our glance, as if she were a bud first opening her heart with wondering rapture to the morning. Such young unfurrowed souls roll to meet each other like two velvet peaches that touch softly and are at rest; they mingle as easily as two brooklets that ask for nothing but to entwine themselves and ripple with ever-interlacing curves in the leafiest hiding-places.
GEORGE ELIOT, Adam Bede
Love is the hastening gravitation of spirit towards spirit, and body towards body, in the joy of creation.
D. H. LAWRENCE, "Love"
Love isn't love until it's past.
PRINCE, Sometimes It Snows in April
Son, if a maiden love thee, thou shalt appear handsome in her sight; she shall praise thine eyes, and the corners of thy mouth, yea, she shall admire thy hands. Though thou wert even as the orangutan yet shall she paint thee with fancies.
GELETT BURGESS, The Maxims of Methuselah
A summer breeze can be very refreshing; but if we try to put it in a tin can so we can have it entirely to ourselves, the breeze will die. Our beloved is the same. He is like a breeze, a cloud, a flower. If you imprison him in a tin can, he will die. Yet many people do just that. They rob their loved one of his liberty, until he can no longer be himself. They live to satisfy themselves and use their loved one to help them fulfill that. That is not loving; it is destroying.
THICH NHAT HANH, Teachings on Love
Yes, life is but a waste,
A cheerless pathway, where
No healthy fruit allures the taste,
No flowerets balm the air,
If Love, the wild rose, ne'er luxuriates there.
WILLIAM B. TAPPAN, "Love"
Love's tendrils round the heart doth twine,
As round the oak doth cling the vine.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON, "Love's Language"
To love is to destroy, and ... to be loved is to be the one destroyed.
CASSANDRA CLARE, City of Bones
If two people are in love they can sleep on the blade of a knife.
EDWARD HOAGLAND, Balancing Acts
You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so how could we take it back without asking?
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
To go through life without love is to travel through the world in a carriage with closed windows.
IVAN PANIN, Thoughts
Love is a moral drunkenness; and, whilst it lasts, the shrew seems gentle, the tigress a dove, the flirt constant, and the fiend an angel.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY, The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos
If the thing loved is base, the lover becomes base.
LEONARDO DA VINCI, Thoughts on Art and Life
Love is the key-note of the universe--
The theme, the melody.
HENRY ABBEY, "The Troubadour"
If there is no love more in yonder heart, it is but a corpse unburied.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, Newcomes
Tell not thy previous loves to a woman, lest she also telleth thee hers.
GELETT BURGESS, The Maxims of Methuselah
Love, in this world, is like a seed taken from the tropics, and planted where the winter comes too soon; and it cannot spread itself in flower-clusters and wide-twining vines, so that the whole air is filled with the perfume thereof. But there is to be another summer for it yet. Care for the root now, and God will care for the top by and by.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Life Thoughts
Love is a spy who is plotting treason,
In league with that warm, red rebel, the Heart.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, "Communism"
'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
ALFRED TENNYSON, In Memoriam
Love's never a fair trade.
MARGARET ATWOOD, The Year of the Flood
Heav'nly love shall outdo Hellish hate.
JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost
Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you?
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Lighthousekeeping
Love makes its record in deeper colors as we grow out of childhood into manhood; as the Emperors signed their names in green ink when under age, but when of age, in purple.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, Table-Talk
Not the swart Pariah in some Indian grove,
Lone, lean, and hunted by his brother’s hate,
Hath drunk so deep the cup of bitter fate
As that poor wretch who cannot, cannot love:
He bears a load which nothing can remove,
A killing, withering weight.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, "The Solitary"
One of the remarkable things about love is that, despite very irritating people writing poems and songs about how pleasant it is, it really is quite pleasant.
DANIEL HANDLER (as Lemony Snicket), Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
Upon Love's bosom Earth floats like an Ark
Safely through all the Deluge of the dark.
GERALD MASSEY, "To My Wife"
Each moment of a happy lover's hour is worth an age of dull and common life.
APHRA BEHN, The Younger Brother
If a man can be properly said to love something, it must be clear that he feels affection for it as a whole, and does not love part of it to the exclusion of the rest.
PLATO, The Republic
Why does a man who is truly in love insist that this relationship must continue and be "lifelong"? Because life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. Who would want to wake up halfway through an operation?
CESARE PAVESE, This Business of Living, Jan. 19, 1938
Love is no hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed; but, flower or weed, whose scent and colour are always wild!
JOHN GALSWORTHY, The Forsyte Saga
Love is made out of ecstasy and wonder;
Love is a poignant and accustomed pain.
It is a burst of Heaven-shaking thunder;
It is a linnet's fluting after rain.
JOYCE KILMER, "In Memory"
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, Prometheus Unbound
Love ... must come suddenly, with great thunderclaps and bolts of lightning -- a hurricane from heaven that drops down on your life, overturns it, tears away your will like a leaf, and carries your whole heart off with it into the abyss.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Madame Bovary
How far above all price Love's costly wine,
Which can the meanest chalice make divine!
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, "Love"
Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Passion
Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.
SYLVIA PLATH, "The Stones," The Colossus and Other Poems
Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, Kafka on the Shore
When you get in love you are made all over again. The person who loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass. So there are two you's, the one you create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't be any difference between the two you's or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment.
ROBERT PENN WARREN, Four Quarters, 1970
I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.
GRAHAM GREENE, The End of the Affair
Trust Love, nor fear to soar upon his track.
The wings that bore to Heaven will bear thee back.
RICHARD GARNETT, De Flagello Myrtes
A man is only as good as what he loves.
SAUL BELLOW, Seize the Day
Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."
ERICH FROMM, The Art of Loving
Love is a sickness full of woes,
All remedies refusing:
A plant that with most cutting grows,
Most barren with best using.
SAMUEL DANIEL, Hymen's Triumph
There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE, Barchester Towers
One word
Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is love.
SOPHOCLES, Oedipus at Colonus
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
THOMAS MANN, The Magic Mountain
Love. My golly, it sells diapers, don't it!
DAVID MAMET, Goldberg Street: Short Plays and Monologues
Love is a kind of warfare.
OVID, The Art of Love
Love knoweth no laws.
JOHN LYLY, Euphues
The world has little to bestow
Where two fond hearts in equal love are joined.
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD, Delia
Love lives in sealed bottles of regret.
SEAN O'FAOLAIN, Saturday Evening Post, Aug. 13, 1966
There is no evil angel but Love.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Love's Labour's Lost
Had we never lov'd sae kindly,
Had we never lov'd sae blindly,
Never met -- or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
ROBERT BURNS, Ae Fond Kiss
No wound is worse than counterfeited love.
SOPHOCLES, Antigone
God is Love, I dare say. But what a mischievous devil Love is.
SAMUEL BUTLER, Note Books
Love between a man and woman is war.
AUGUST STRINDBERG, The Father
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will some new pleasure prove
Of golden sands, and crystal brooks,
With silken lines, and silver hooks.
JOHN DONNE, The Bait
There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear.
BIBLE, I John 4:18
He who knows Love becomes Love, and he knows
All beings are himself, twin-born of Love.
ELSA BARKER, He Who Knows Love
All love is lost but upon God alone.
WILLIAM DUNBAR, The Merle and the Nightingale
Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.
ANATOLE FRANCE, The Garden of Epicurus
Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone—but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.
BETTE DAVIS, The Lonely Life
Love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight.
THE BEATLES, I'm Looking Through You
When love grows diseas'd, the best thing we can do is to put it to a violent death; I cannot endure the torture of a ling'ring and consumptive passion.
GEORGE ETHEREGE, The Man of Mode
Perhaps love's greatest gift--that it is indeed unconditional--is also its greatest curse.
KRISTIN ARMSTRONG, O Magazine, Feb. 2007
When does love cease? When one begins to love anew.
LAURA ESQUIVEL, The Law of Love
It is love that I am seeking for,
But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind
That is not in the world.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, The Shadowy Waters
Now, girls, if you want to observe a young man hustle out after a pick and shovel, just tell him that your heart is in some other fellow's grave. Young men are grave-robbers by nature.
O. HENRY, "The Count and the Wedding Guest"
Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful molder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State- and Church-begotten weed, marriage?
EMMA GOLDMAN, Anarchism and Other Essays
There is no disguise which can hide love for long where it exists, or simulate it where it does not.
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, Maxims
Love and a cough cannot be hid.
GEORGE HERBERT, Jacula Prudentum
In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
THE BEATLES, End
Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Hero and Leander
Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.
JOHN DONNE, The Anagram
Without warning
as a whirlwind
swoops on an oak
Love shakes my heart
SAPPHO, Without Warning
Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore.
NEIL GAIMAN, The Sandman #65
Ah, love is a voyage with water and a star,
in drowning air and squalls of precipitate bran;
love is a war of lights in the lightning flashes,
two bodies blasted in a single burst of honey.
PABLO NERUDA, Morning XII
Since to be loved endures,
To love is wise.
ROBERT BRIDGES, Since to be Loved Endures
If you love someone but rarely make yourself available to him or her, that is not true love.
THICH NHAT HANH, Living Buddha, Living Christ
The way you make love
is the way God will be with you.
RUMI, The Book of Love
The weight of love
Has buoyed me up
Till my head
Knocks against the sky.
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, O Magazine, Feb. 2007
Love released from bond, and unburdened of its fetters, is love no longer
THOMAS BURKE, A Love Lesson
Love is said to be an involuntary passion, and it is, therefore, contended that it cannot be resisted. This is true in part only, for like all things else, when nourished and supplied plentifully with ailment, it is rapid in its progress; but let these be withdrawn and it may be stifled in its birth or much stinted in its growth.
GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter to Eleanor Parke Custis, Jan. 16, 1795
With his venom
irresistible
and bittersweet
that loosener
of limbs, Love
reptile-like
strikes me down
SAPPHO, With His Venom
Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love.
BERTRAND RUSSELL, Marriage and Morals
Once you love someone it’s like cancer. It spreads and spreads until it eats you up.
ANN WUEHLER, Interviews With Loneliness
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
MOZART
All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, Love
No distance can keep anxious lovers long asunder.
GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, Sep. 30, 1779
We've got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant.... You've got to keep watering it. You've got to really look after it and nurture it.
JOHN LENNON, ATV interview, Dec. 2, 1969
I think love adds to everything. I'm an old softie about that. I think love is the most important thing in life. If you don't have [a relationship], you're always looking for one. It's the motivator, the driver.
SHERYL CROW, Dr. Drew interview, 2001
Well they say that love is in the air, but never is it clear,
How to pull it close and make it stay
Butterflies are free to fly, and so they fly away
And I'm left to carry on and wonder why
SHERYL CROW, "Always on Your Side"
If you do not give right attention to the one you love, it is a kind of killing. When you are in the car together, if you are lost in your thoughts, assuming you already know everything about her, she will slowly die.
THICH NHAT HANH, O Magazine, Feb. 2007
All you need is love.
THE BEATLES, All You Need Is Love
Of all fires
love is the only inexhaustible one.
PABLO NERUDA, O Magazine, Feb. 2007
Love is a barren sea, bitter and deep;
And though she saw all heaven in flower above,
She would not love.
Algernon Charles Swinburne, "A Leave-taking"
Love is like the wild rose-briar;
Friendship like the holly-tree.
The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms,
But which will bloom most constantly?
Emily Brontë, Love and Friendship
Love is, above all else, the gift of oneself.
JEAN ANOUILH, L'homme et la mort dans l'histoire
The truth about love is that it is ever changing. Throughout the life of a relationship, individuals change and life itself changes. Love has to be flexible enough to accommodate new information, new roles, and new ways of loving one another.
PATRICIA LOVE, The Truth About Love
OVE QUOTES IV
My love is a bird
Happily singing on my shoulder
Would you like to be the cage
A sweet cage forever?
JINSONG GUO, Love Poems N' Quotes by Dr. Guo, "R U STill There?"
True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, Love: Quotes and Passages from the Heart (B.C. Aronson)
As your lover describes you, so you are.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Sexing the Cherry
Call us what you will, we are made such by love.
JOHN DONNE, The Canonization
Love is the only shocking act left on the face of the earth.
SANDRA BERNHARD, Parted Lips: Lesbian Love Quotes Through the Ages
I used to think romantic love was a neurosis shared by two, a supreme foolishness. I no longer think that. There's nothing foolish in loving anyone. Thinking you'll be loved in return is what's foolish.
RITA MAE BROWN, Bingo
Love clamors far more incessantly and passionately at a closed gate than an open one!
MARIE CORELLI, The Master Christian
Love is the wild card of existence.
RITA MAE BROWN, In Her Day
I love the one who punishes me well.
ANNE RICE, Beauty's Release
You can love more than one person at a time, and I don't give a damn what the self-help books say.
RITA MAE BROWN, Full Cry
I profess not to know how women's hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration. Some seem to have but one vulnerable point, or door of access; while others have a thousand avenues, and may be captured in a thousand different ways. It is a great triumph of skill to gain the former, but a still greater proof of generalship to maintain possession of the latter, for man must battle for his fortress at every door and window. He who wins a thousand common hearts is therefore entitled to some renown; but he who keeps undisputed sway over the heart of a coquette is indeed a hero.
WASHINGTON IRVING, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Love likes not the falling fruit,
Nor the withered tree.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH, As Ye Came from the Holy Land
O, wicked love ... that has so many unnamed components.
ANNE RICE, Beauty's Punishment
Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.
BIBLE, John 15:13
Mother love is the most powerful, the most irrational force on earth, even more powerful than sexual love. However, one does lead to the other, so best not to spurn the former.
RITA MAE BROWN, Full Cry
We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tombs and hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse.
JOHN DONNE, The Canonization
True love will not brook reserve; it feels undervalued and outraged, when even the sorrows of those it loves are concealed from it.
WASHINGTON IRVING, "The Wife," The Sketch Book
Love is an anesthesia. It puts you to sleep, it allows you to overlook, not question, not care ... and then, one day, you come to. And, by God and all his horny angels ... it’s an eye opener.
ANN WUEHLER, The Next Mrs. Jacob Anderson
'Know that Love is a careless child,
And forgets promises past;
He is blind, he is deaf when he list,
And in faith never fast.
'His desire is a dureless content,
And a trustless joy;
He is won with a world of despair,
And is lost with a toy.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH, As Ye Came from the Holy Land
Love life's weariness leavens.
HENRI CAZALIS, "Always"
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
JOHN DONNE, The Sun Rising
My Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis, for object, strange and high;
It was begotten by Despair,
Upon Impossibility.
ANDREW MARVELL, The Definition of Love
The flame of anger, bright and brief,
Sharpens the barb of Love.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR, Tell Me Not Things Past all Belief
The music that inspires the souls of lovers exists within themselves and the private universe they occupy. They share it with each other; they do not share it with the tribe or with society. The courage to hear that music and to honor it is one of the prerequisites of romantic love.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN, The Psychology of Romantic Love
The prerequisite to loving others is to love yourself. If you don't have a healthy respect for who you are, and if you don't learn to accept yourself faults and all, you will never be able to properly love other people.
JOEL OSTEEN, Become a Better You
If you believe yourself unfortunate, because you have "loved and lost," perish the thought. One who has loved truly, can never lose entirely. Love is whimsical and temperamental. Its nature is ephemeral, and transitory. It comes when it pleases, and goes away without warning. Accept and enjoy it while it remains, but spend no time worrying about its departure. Worry will never bring it back.
NAPOLEON HILL, Think and Grow Rich
Love, how many roads to reach a kiss.
PABLO NERUDA, Love, How many Roads to Reach a Kiss
LOVE QUOTES V
Many great persons have been of opinion that love is no other thing than complacency itself, in which they have had much appearance of reason. For not only does the movement of love take its origin from the complacency which the heart feels at the first approach of good, and find its end in a second complacency which returns to the heart by union with the thing beloved--but further, it depends for its preservation on this complacency, and can only subsist through it as through its mother and nurse; so that as soon as the complacency ceases, love ceases.
ST. FRANCIS DE SALES, Treatise on the Love of God
Love kills.
EDNA BUCHANAN, Love Kills
Maybe the act of love came too late. As a career move, I should have lost my burdensome virginity at thirteen or fourteen, when there would have been no question of lasting attachment and no desire for one. As it was, I shook when I removed my clothes and I cried after it was done, not out of pain or disappointment but out of an up-rush of muddling emotion which twenty-four hours later I was ready to call love.
HILARY MANTEL, An Experiment in Love
Ah, when love dies, women lose two and a half inches in height.
M. C. BEATON, Love, Lies and Liquor
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY, Wind, Sand and Stars
Why does it seem to be more and more challenging to find a perfect mate or maintain a happy and compatible relationship? Was love always this difficult? Haven't we heard stories of people being truly fulfilled and happy in love? Is love a myth? There are more people on the planet than ever before, and traveling the world has never been easier. Not only that; now we can use technologies like the Internet to connect with others. So what is the problem? Why does it seem to be more complicated than ever to meet the right person and live happily ever after?
PAMELA OSLIE, Love Colors
It was always about love. Always, always about love. Lost love, love denied, the obsessive hunger for love. Parental or romantic. Whether it was twisted or pure, fulfilled or unrequited, love was always at the source.
JAMES W. HALL, Magic City
Love does not seek equals; it creates them.
STENDAHL, The Red and the Black
Oh love, rose made wet by mermaids and foams,
fire that dances and climbs up the invisible stairs
and awakens the blood in the tunnel of sleeplessness.
PABLO NERUDA, The Month of March Returns with its Hidden Light
It has been hard, I know, my daughters, but one word alone wipes out all of the hardships: love.
SOPHOCLES, Oedipus at Colonus
Sexual ecstasy usually arises among dyads, or groups of two, but the ritual ecstasy of "primitives" emerged within groups generally composed of thirty or more participants. Thanks to psychology and the psychological concerns of Western culture generally, we have a rich language for describing the emotions drawing one person to another--from the most fleeting sexual attraction, to ego-dissolving love, all the way to the destructive force of obsession. What we lack is any way of describing and understanding the "love" that may exist among dozens of people at a time; and it is this kind of love that is expressed in ecstatic ritual.
BARBARA EHRENREICH, Dancing in the Streets
When there is love, you can live even without happiness.
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY, Notes From Underground
Some things you can feel coming. You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. When you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.
UMBERTO ECO, Foucault's Pendulum
The clearer and happier you feel inside, the more joyous and loving your outer world becomes because love attracts love.
JUDY HALL, Love Crystals
They stayed together and watched each other slowly become strangers, watched their love die as you watch a great old gum tree succumb to dieback.
RICHARD FLANAGAN, The Unknown Terrorist
True love turns words and feelings into actions.
JOEL OSTEEN, Become a Better You
Never mingle love and business.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE, Barchester Towers
Love and death were what novels were about.
OAKLEY HALL, Love and War in California
He who falls in love in bars doesn't need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan.
UMBERTO ECO, Foucault's Pendulum
The ideal of romantic love stands in opposition to much of our history, as we shall see. First of all, it is individualistic. It rejects the view of human beings as interchangeable units, and it attaches the highest importance to individual differences as well as to individual choice. Romantic love is egoistic, in the philosophical, not in the petty, sense. Egoism as a philosophical doctrine holds that self-realization and personal happiness are the moral goals of life, and romantic love is motivated by the desire for personal happiness. Romantic love is secular. In its union of physical with spiritual pleasure in sex and love, as well as in its union of romance and daily life, romantic love is a passionate commitment to this earth and to the exalted happiness that life on earth can offer.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN, The Psychology of Romantic Love
Love is what you've been through with somebody.
JAMES THURBER, Life Magazine, Mar. 14, 1960
I say love, and the world populates itself with doves.
PABLO NERUDA, Get Used to Seeing the Shadow Behind Me
When people say, "God is love," I think they mean that love is extremely important, or that God really wants us to love. But in Christian conception, God really has love as his essence.
TIMOTHY KELLER, The Reason for God
For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.
GEORGE ELIOT, Daniel Deronda
I'd call it love if love
didn't take so many years
but lust too is a jewel.
ADRIENNE RICH, Necessities of Life
Why the pull of sexual attraction to someone who is unfamiliar, whose allure as Horace marked, portends a war with one's self? As we'll consider, the object of sexual desire has a different constitution from the focus of personal love. With sexual love, there is an emphasis upon touch and kinesthesia that alters the whole/part structure of objects. It brings with it a shift in temporality as well as makes the pleasure of repetitive sexual scenarios curiously new and unique.
PETER HADREAS, A Phenomenology of Love and Hate
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
LOVE QUOTES VI
It is not love that he feels for me. It is more like a constant resentment that has become such a habit to him that to have it removed, like an aching tooth, brings him no relief.
PHILIPPA GREGORY, The Boleyn Inheritance
If Love his moment overstay,
Hatred's swift repulsions play.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, The Visit
The kind of love my mum talks about is full of worry and work and forgiving people and putting up with things and stuff like that. It's not a lot of fun, that's for sure. If that really is love, the kind my mum talks about, then nobody can ever know if they love somebody, can they? It seems like what she's saying is, if you're pretty sure you love somebody, the way I was sure in those few weeks, then you can't love them, because that isn't what love is. Trying to understand what she means by love would do your head in.
NICK HORNBY, Slam
Love always has its price, come whence it may.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT, "Miss Harriet"
Giving and receiving love is vital to human existence. It is the glue that binds couples, families, communities, cultures, and nations.
FRANK LAWLIS, Mending the Broken Bond
Sex is the joining of two bodies; love is the joining of two souls.
GARY D. CHAPMAN, Making Love
In this day and age, love is temporary and marriage is unnatural--the product of Madison Avenue advertising executives and television producers.
MICHAEL PALMER, The Fifth Vial
A blaze of love, and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.
THOMAS HARDY, The Return of the Native
Love he comes and Love he tarries
Just as fate or fancy carries;
Longest stays, when sorest chidden;
Laughs and flies, when press'd and bidden.
THOMAS CAMPBELL, Freedom and Love
Love's a fire that needs renewal
Of fresh beauty for its fuel.
THOMAS CAMPBELL, Freedom and Love
Love is one long sweet dream, and marriage is the alarm clock.
DAVID MINKOFF, Oy!
If with love thy heart has burned;
If thy love is unreturned;
Hide thy grief within thy breast,
Though it tear thee unexpressed;
For when love has once departed
From the eyes of the false-hearted,
And one by one has torn off quite
The bandages of purple light;
Though thou wert the loveliest
Form the soul had ever dressed,
Thou shalt seem, in each reply,
A vixen to his altered eye;
Thy softest pleadings seem too bold,
Thy praying lute will seem to scold;
Though thou kept the straightest road,
Yet thou errest far and broad.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, To Rhea
There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick.
ANNE ENRIGHT, The Gathering
Love on his errand bound to go
Can swim the flood and wade through snow,
Where way is none, 't will creep and wind
And eat through Alps its home to find.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Love
Love, which, in concert with Abstinence, established Faith, and which, along with Patience, builds up Chastity, is like the columns that sustain the four corners of a house. For it was that same Love which planted a glorious garden redolent with precious herbs and noble flowers--roses and lilies--which breathed forth a wondrous fragrance, that garden on which the true Solomon was accustomed to feast his eyes.
HILDEGARD OF BINGEN, letter to the Monk Guibert, 1176
To show great love for God and our neighbor we need not do great things. It is how much love we put in the doing that makes our offering Something Beautiful for God.
MOTHER TERESA, A Gift for God
When you love someone
you have to let them go.
It's the only way to keep them.
MACRINA WIEDERKEHR, Seasons of Your Heart
Love abounds in all things,
excels from the depths to beyond the stars,
is lovingly disposed to all things.
She has given the king on high
the kiss of peace.
HILDEGARD OF BINGEN, "Caritas abundat"
Most people know the sheer wonder that goes with falling in love, how not only does everything in heaven and earth become new, but the lover himself becomes new. It is literally like the sap rising in the tree, putting forth new green shoots of life.
CARYLL HOUSELANDER, The Reed of God
Every little thing wants to be loved.
SUE MONK KIDD, The Secret Life of Bees
Why does one love? How queer it is to see only one being in the world, to have only one thought in one's mind, only one desire in the heart, and only one name on the lips--a name which comes up continually, rising, like the water in a spring, from the depths of the soul to the lips, a name which one repeats over and over again, which one whispers ceaselessly, everywhere, like a prayer.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT, "Was it a Dream?"
Love wakes men, once a lifetime each;
They lift their heavy lids, and look;
And, lo, what one sweet page can teach
They read with joy, then shut the book.
COVENTRY PATMORE, "The Revelation"
We outgrow love like other things
And put it in the drawer,
Till it an antique fashion shows
Like costumes grandsires wore.
EMILY DICKINSON, "We Outgrow Love Like Other Things"
LOVE QUOTES VII
Love is enough: though the World be a-waning,
And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining,
Though the sky be too dark for dim eyes to discover
The gold-cups and daisies fair blooming thereunder,
Though the hills be held shadows, and the sea a dark wonder
And this day draw a veil over all deeds pass'd over,
Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter;
The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter
These lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover.
WILLIAM MORRIS, "Love Is Enough"
Love makes the world less worldly, less dense, more transparent to the divine dimension, the light of consciousness itself.
ECKHART TOLLE, A New Earth
Love is a flaming heart, and its flames aspire
Till they cloud the soul in the smoke of a windy fire.
ARTHUR SYMONS, "In the Wood of Finvara"
O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
W. B. YEATS, "Brown Penny"
Love, they say, is a pain
Infinite as the soul,
Ever a longing to be
Love's, to infinity,
Ever a longing in vain
After a vanishing goal.
ARTHUR SYMONS, "Rosa Mundi"
Love can be a terrible curse. It can make you overlook even the largest flaws in a person's behavior.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI, Brisingr
What is commonly called "falling in love" is in most cases an intensification of egoic wanting and needing. You become addicted to another person, or rather to your image of that person. It has nothing to do with true love, which contains no wanting whatsoever.
ECKHART TOLLE, A New Earth
To have loved, to have been made happy thus,
What better fate has life in store for us?
ARTHUR SYMONS, "Variations Upon Love"
Of the affairs of love ... my only advice is to be honest. That's your most powerful tool to unlock a heart or gain forgiveness.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI, Eragon
I've never had my heart broken ... It's a very sad state of affairs. I think everybody should have their heart broken. I don't think it says anything good about me at all ... My lover and my best friend and my partner has been my work. But I certainly would in life have wanted to know--would like to know--what it was like to have a real partner.
SALLY FIELD, Good Housekeeping, Mar. 2009
To love someone is to long to be loved by that someone.
CHRIS SEIDMAN, Little Buddy
Love is never free ... It is the most expensive emotion we have.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON, Burnt Offerings
True love always brings joy to ourselves and to the one we love. If our love does not bring joy to both of us, it is not true love.
THICH NHAT HANH, Teachings on Love
If you love someone, when it's the most real, the most important thing in your life, it's not enough to coast. You need to dig in those footers, start building on that base. You want something to last, you put your back into it.
NORA ROBERTS, Blue Smoke
Love sucks. Sometimes it feels good. Sometimes it's just another way to bleed.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON, Blue Moon
Happy is love or friendship when returned--
The lovers whose pure flames have equal burned.
BION OF SMYRNA, "Friendship"
A lover is like a firefly,
lighting your life for a moment,
then leaving you to deal with the darkness
Until it flashes again.
RICH REITH, "Soulmate"
Love is a warm brain, not a leaping heart.
TIM LEBBON, Face
Love made you vulnerable; if you gave your heart to another, they could leave you or die.
JOHN TWELVE HAWKS, The Traveler
Love is always right.
RICHARD LAYMON, The Stake
If you love someone, then your freedom is curtailed. If you love someone, you give up much of your privacy. If you love someone, then you are no longer merely one person but half of a couple. To think or behave any other way is to risk losing that love.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON, Obsidian Butterfly
Love and money should properly have nothing to do with each other.
JOHN SAUL, Guardian
If you think love makes you happy, you've either never been in love, or never been in love long enough to have to start compromising.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON, Obsidian Butterfly
Love, however doomed, had the capacity to attach buoys to the soul.
ARIANA FRANKLIN, Mistress of the Art of Death
Love must be first and last, the part, the whole;
Must fill the human void as ocean fills
Its broadest channels, ancient as the hills,
And slightest shell o'er which its waters roll.
WILLIAM WILSEY MARTIN, "Love"
All human love is a faint type of God's;
An echoing note from a harmonious whole;
A feeble spark from an undying flame;
A single drop from an unfathomed sea:
But God's is infinite; it fills the earth
And heaven, and the broad, trackless realms of space.
ALBERT LAIGHTON, "The Love of God"
LOVE QUOTES VIII
Love's dream, too, knows decay;
Awhile the soul-harp's wildly thrilling strain
Pours out those notes we ne'er forget again,
And the deep fountains of the heart burst forth
As if to gladden every spot of earth;
But O! it will not stay.
MARY T. LATHRAP, "Song of the Earth-Weary"
Two such as you with such a master speed
Cannot be parted nor be swept away
From one another once you are agreed
That life is only life forevermore
Together wing to wing and oar to oar.
ROBERT FROST, The Master Speed
Love is the Soul's exquisite vibrations....
Love is the Soul at song.
EDWIN LEIBFREED, "The Song of the Soul"
For misdirected love, the attainment of its object is, indeed, the best cure; but it cures as the guillotine cures headache.
IVAN PANIN, Thoughts
Marrying to increase love is like gaming to become rich; alas, you only lose what little stock you had before.
WILLIAM WYCHERLEY, The Country Wife
Love and marriage, love and marriage
Go together like a horse and carriage
Dad was told by mother
You can't have one without the other.
SAMMY CAHN, "Love and Marriage"
Caressing reassures lovers that their love endures.
WITTER BYNNER, "Rose-Time"
A man in love is incomplete until he has married--then he's finished.
ZSA ZSA GABOR, Newsweek, Mar. 28, 1960
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh, no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark
Whose worth's unknown, although its height be taken.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, sonnet cxvi
Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.
ELLEN KEY, "The Morality of Woman"
We must rejoice when love is great, and pardon its excess, for love is the staff of life, and life without love is life in vain.
ARTHUR LYNCH, Moods of Life
Love, the hidden spring of life, and soul's desire.
Celestial gold, secreted, laid by fire
In every heart, in every thing that lives,
In every thought that human impulse gives.
The coin of heaven, the treasure of the earth,
The rarest gift, and joy of largest worth.
EDWIN LEIBFREED, "Love"
Love is not like the echo, which returneth only what is given; but, rather, like the pump, which returneth by the pail what it received by the pint.
IVAN PANIN, Thoughts
God has set his intentions in the flowers, in the dawn, in the spring--it is his will that we should love.
VICTOR HUGO, Toilers of the Sea
Some hold love to be for conquest, both of persons and of things,
But supreme love, all unheeding, straight forgets the gift it brings.
EDWIN LEIBFREED, "Caelestis"
Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others. As long as its spell lasts, the only in-between which can insert itself between two lovers is the child, love's own product. The child, this in-between, to which the lovers now are related and which they hold in common, is representative of the world in that it also separates them; it is an indication that they will insert a new world into the existing world. Through the child, it is as though the lovers return to the world from which their love had expelled them. But this new worldliness, the possible result and the only possibly happy ending of a love affair, is, in a sense, the end of love, which must either overcome the partners anew or be transformed into another mode of belonging together.
HANNAH ARENDT, The Human Condition
Ah! let us love, my Love, for Time is heartless,
Be happy while you may!
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE, "The Lake"
Love it is the precious loom,
Whose shuttle weaves each tangled thread,
And works flowers of exquisite bloom,
Shedding their perfume where we tread.
JAMES MCINTYRE, "Power of Love"
He who loveth, knoweth the inner sun; he see'th Life's blaze.
ELISE PUMPELLY CABOT, "Arizona"
True love survives all shocks: an affection originally produced by admiration for unusual beauty may not only survive the loss of that beauty, but may become more intense if the beauty has changed into ugliness through causes that bind the lovers together in tender associations.
ARTHUR LYNCH, Moods of Life
Divinely blessed is rose or man
That answers to love's whispered plan,
And gladly owns it paradise
To be love's perfect sacrifice.
EDWIN LEIBFREED, "The Lady and the Rose"
It may be true that love is blind, but only for what is ugly: its sight is keen enough for what is beautiful.
IVAN PANIN, Thoughts
Love isn't like money--the more you give away the more you get back, and the more you have to give.
S. M. STIRLING, The Sunrise Lands
O, high the happy bosom heaves
When love is in the dancer!
WITTER BYNNER, "Three Poplars"
Sacred love is selfless, seeking not its own. The lover serves his beloved and seeks perfect communion of oneness with her.
D. H. LAWRENCE, "Love"
LOVE QUOTES IX
Love is the master of our lives,
And, e'en though happy subjects we,
We're governed by his scepter strong
Through time and through eternity.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON, "Love's Melody"
Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in his glowing hands;
Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.
Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.
ALFRED TENNYSON, Locksley Hall
It is a wonderful subduer, this need of love--this hunger of the heart--as peremptory as that other hunger by which Nature forces us to submit to the yoke, and change the face of the world.
GEORGE ELIOT, The Mill on the Floss
Love--what a volume in a word, an ocean in a tear,
A seventh heaven in a glance, a whirlwind in a sigh,
The lightning in a touch, a millennium in a moment,
What concentrated joy or woe in blest or blighted love!
For it is that native poetry springing up indigenous to Mind,
The heart's own-country music thrilling all its chords,
The story without an end that angels throng to hear,
The word, the king of words, carved on Jehovah's heart!
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER, Proverbial Philosophy
Only love heals. Anger, guilt, and fear can only destroy.
ALYSON NOËL, Evermore
Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.
GEORGE ELIOT, Silas Marner
We often weep beneath Love's cross,
But when she calls we her obey.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON, "Love's Guide-Board"
We all have the seeds of love in us.We can develop this wonderful source of energy, nurturing the unconditional love that does not expect anything in return.
THICH NHAT HANH, Teachings on Love
Among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is the strongest and most enduring: when passion comes to unite its force to long affection, love is at its spring-tide.
GEORGE ELIOT, Mr. Gilfil's Love Story
Love speaks a language most sublime,
Its idioms known in every clime.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON, "Love's Language"
That adoration which a young man gives to a woman whom he feels to be greater and better than himself, is hardly distinguishable from religious feeling. What deep and worthy love is so? whether of woman or child, or art or music. Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies, all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.
GEORGE ELIOT, Adam Bede
Upon the roadway of my life,
A guide-board I will leave of love,
So those who follow in my steps
May guided be to hills above.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON, "Love's Guide-Board"
Blessed influence of one true loving human soul on another! Not calculable by algebra, not deducible by logic, but mysterious, effectual, mighty as the hidden process by which the tiny seed is quickened, and bursts forth into tall stem and broad leaf, and glowing tasseled flower.
GEORGE ELIOT, Janet's Repentance
Love's language everywhere is known.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON, "Love's Language"
We look at the one little woman's face we love, as we look at the face of our mother earth, and see all sorts of answers to our own yearnings.
GEORGE ELIOT, Adam Bede
There is in man's nature a secret inclination and motion towards love of others, which, if it be not spent upon some one or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many, and maketh men become humane and charitable, as it is seen sometimes in friars. Nuptial love maketh mankind, friendly love perfecteth it, but wanton love corrupteth and embaseth it.
FRANCIS BACON, Essays
Young love-making--that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to--the things whence its subtle interlacings are swung--are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust.
GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch
The stage is more beholding to love than the life of man. For as to the stage, love is ever matter of comedies and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief, sometimes like a Siren, sometimes like a Fury.
FRANCIS BACON, Essays
Great Love has many attributes, and shrines
For varied worshippers, but his force divine
Shows most its many-named fulness in the man
Whose nature multitudinously mixed--
Each ardent impulse grappling with a thought--
Resists all easy gladness, all content
Save mystic rapture, where the questioning soul
Flooded with consciousness of good that is
Finds life one bounteous answer.
GEORGE ELIOT, The Spanish Gypsy
Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.
DAN SIMMONS, The Fall of Hyperion
I tell thee Love is Nature's second sun,
Causing a spring of virtues where he shines.
GEORGE CHAPMAN, All Fools
In order to be loved, we have to love, which means we have to understand.
THICH NHAT HANH, Teachings on Love
LOVE QUOTES X
True love always brings joy to ourselves and to the one we love. If our love does not bring joy to both of us, it is not true love.
THICH NHAT HANH, Teachings on Love
People try to reconcile you to a disappointment in love by asking why you should cherish a passion for an object that has proved itself worthless. Had you known this before, you would not have encouraged the passion; but that having been once formed, knowledge does not destroy it. If we have drank poison, finding it out does not prevent its being in our veins: so passion leaves its poison in the mind!
WILLIAM HAZLITT, Characteristics
Love is a volcano, the crater of which no wise man will approach too nearly, lest ... he should be swallowed up.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon
Love is a boomering that returns to the thrower's hand.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
Love endeth like the chianti flask, its drops are bitter.
GELETT BURGESS, The Maxims of Methuselah
Ah, love, 'tis a sorrowful land!
KENNETH RAND, "The Old Lovers"
Our earthly loves are but so many silver steps leading us up to the great golden love of God.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Love is an alliance of friendship and of lust; if the former predominate, it is a passion exalted and refined, but if the latter, gross and sensual.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon
A man in love prefers his passion to every other consideration, and is fonder of his mistress than he is of virtue. Should she prove vicious, she makes vice lovely in his eyes.
WILLIAM HAZLITT, Characteristics
Love dwindles by pairing.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
Her heart consenteth before her lips say: Yea; and in this interval lieth her Paradise; wherefore she would prolong it.
GELETT BURGESS, The Maxims of Methuselah
Nothing goes far which has not the wings of love to make it buoyant, so that it can fly.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
A summer romance is something special, because it blazes like a comet across the sky and then fades out. The thing that makes it special--that makes everything move so fast--is that a summer romance is doomed to end.
JOHN VORNHOLT, Coyote Moon
Love may turn to indifference with possession.
WILLIAM HAZLITT, Characteristics
Love is the medicine of all moral evil. By it the world is to be cured of sin.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
No man knoweth how another man maketh his love, for women tell not.
GELETT BURGESS, The Maxims of Methuselah
All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase--"I love you."
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, "The Offshore Pirate"
There is not on earth so base a knave as the man who wins the love of a woman when he knows that he cannot or ought not to requite it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
A woman findeth in her last lover much of her first love; but a man seeth his next-to-the-last love, alway.
GELETT BURGESS, The Maxims of Methuselah
If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.
LYNDA BARRY, attributed, The Surrendered Single
Marriage--what an abomination! Love--yes, but not marriage. Love cannot exist in marriage, because love is an ideal; that is to say, something not quite understood--transparencies, colour, light, a sense of the unreal. But a wife--you know all about her--who her father was, who her mother was, what she thinks of you and her opinion of the neighbours over the way. Where, then, is the dream, the au dela? There is none. I say in marriage an au dela is impossible ... the endless duet of the marble and the water, the enervation of burning odours, the baptismal whiteness of women, light, ideal tissues, eyes strangely dark with kohl, names that evoke palm trees and ruins, Spanish moonlight or maybe Persepolis. The monosyllable which epitomizes the ennui and the prose of our lives is heard not, thought not there--only the nightingale-harmony of an eternal yes. Freedom limitless; the Mahometan stands on the verge of the abyss, and the spaces of perfume and colour extend and invite him with the whisper of a sweet unending yes. The unknown, the unreal ... Thus love is possible, there is a delusion, an au dela.
GEORGE MOORE, Confessions of a Young Man
Of all earthly music, that which reaches the farthest into heaven is the beating of a loving heart.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Love must be the same in all worlds.
HORACE MANN, Thoughts
Hurry not a woman's favor; neither forcer her hastily to surrender to thee. For she goeth into love as she goeth into the waters at the seashore; first a hand and then a lip goeth she in by littles. She diveth not, she leapeth not from the pier; but by gentle shocks and cries of protest she entereth slowly; yet when the waters of love encompass her, then she is supported. She swimmeth in her joy; she floateth on the tide of happiness.
GELETT BURGESS, The Maxims of Methuselah
The highest evidence that love exists is its readiness to overlook and pardon faults.
REUEN THOMAS, Thoughts for the Thoughtful
Love not only occupies the higher lobes of the brain, but crowds out the lower to make room for its expansion.
HORACE MANN, Thoughts
Love, like the cold bath, is never negative, it seldom leaves us where it finds us; if once we plunge into it, it will either heighten our virtues, or inflame our vices.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon
When we hear complaints of the wretchedness or vanity of human life, the proper answer to them would be that there is hardly any one who at some point or other has not been in love. If we consider the high abstraction of this feeling, its depth, its purity, its voluptuous refinement, even in the meanest breast, how sacred and how sweet it is, this alone may reconcile us to the lot of humanity. That drop of balm turns the bitter cup to a delicious nectar.
WILLIAM HAZLITT, Characteristics
He gives a ripe apple for an apple-blossom that changes an old love for a new.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
[Nature's] crown is Love. Only through Love can we come near her. She puts gulfs between all things, and all things strive to be interfused. She isolates everything, that she may draw everything together. With a few draughts from the cup of Love she repays for a life full of trouble.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
LOVE QUOTES XI
No fruit has a more precise marked period of maturity, than love; if neglected to be gathered at that time, it will certainly fall to the ground and die away.
FULKE GREVILLE, Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
Love! Love until the night collapses!
PABLO NERUDA, "Come Up with Me"
Love is my religion--I could die for that.
JOHN KEATS, letter to Fanny Brawne, Oct. 13, 1819
It is much easier to tell a woman you love her when you do not than when you do.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM, The Maxims of Marmaduke
A capacity for hating the object of desire is, perhaps, the best cure for love in cases of disappointment.
NORMAN MACDONALD, Maxims and Moral Reflections
Love renders the proud humble, and tames the fierce; it is at once the most and the least selfish of all passions; for, whilst it would engross the being on whom it is lavished, it will make any sacrifice, or undergo any privation, to insure the comfort of her it would possess.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY, The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos
Love differs from all the other contagious diseases: the last time a man is exposed to it, he takes it most readily, and has it the worst!
BRET HARTE, "Two Men of Sandy Bar"
In love, we are best pleased when we please others.
NORMAN MACDONALD, Maxims and Moral Reflections
A lover is often most unjustly ridiculed for investing the woman for whom he has a passion, with qualities and feelings that she may not in reality possess; but in this, as in most cases, the world delights to judge unkindly; for it ought not to be overlooked that he is merely clothing the idol of his affections with his own beautiful conceptions of what she should be--transferring to her a superiority of sentiment which, in fact, belongs to himself, since it must have existed in his own mind before it could have been brought forward to adorn that of another. The pleasures of the world are all in imagination, else what a curse would existence be!
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY, The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos
In love, first please the eye, then win the heart.
NORMAN MACDONALD, Maxims and Moral Reflections
All human actions are motivated at their deepest level by two emotions--fear or love. In truth there are only two emotions--only two words in the language of the soul.... Fear wraps our bodies in clothing, love allows us to stand naked. Fear clings to and clutches all that we have, love gives all that we have away. Fear holds close, love holds dear. Fear grasps, love lets go. Fear rankles, love soothes. Fear attacks, love amends.
NEALE DONALD WALSCH, Conversations with God
A history of listening to Top 40 radio had left me with a ridiculous and clichéd notion of love. I had never entertained the feeling myself but knew that it meant never having to say you're sorry. It was a many-splendored thing. Love was a rose and a hammer. Both blind and all-seeing, it made the world go round.
DAVID SEDARIS, Naked
Enjoyment inflames love in some men, and extinguishes it in others: the wind that assists large vessels, upsets small ones.
NORMAN MACDONALD, Maxims and Moral Reflections
LOVE.--A sentiment we all entertain for ourselves, and occasionally imagine others entertain for us.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM, The Maxims of Marmaduke
Love is an artful arrangement of artless pretensions, whereby we labor to appear innocent in what we desire to be most cunning.
NORMAN MACDONALD, Maxims and Moral Reflections
Though love and hatred are as opposites as fire and water, yet do they sometimes subsist in the breast together towards the same person; nay by their very opposition and desire to destroy each other, are they strengthened and increased.
FULKE GREVILLE, Maxims, Characters and Reflections
Looking back, I should have known better than to accompany Hugh to a love story. Such movies are always a danger, as unlike battling aliens or going undercover to track a serial killer, falling in love is something most adults have actually experienced at some point in their lives. The theme is universal and encourages the viewer to make a number of unhealthy comparisons, ultimately raising the question "Why can't our lives be like that?" It's a box best left unopened, and its avoidance explains the continued popularity of vampire epics and martial-arts extravaganzas.
DAVID SEDARIS, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
Violent people usually express their love of a thing by their hatred of its opposite.
NORMAN MACDONALD, Maxims and Moral Reflections
You can't make me love you.
NEIL GAIMAN, Coraline
Love will sacrifice more to others than friendship, but then it exacts more from them.
FULKE GREVILLE, Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
Is--Love, forgive us!--cinders, ashes, dust;
Love in a palace is perhaps at last
More grievous torment than a hermit's fast.
JOHN KEATS, "Lamia"
At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz"
The great unrequited love tears open your heart to the beauty of the world, its small rivers and upland meadows. It also makes you kinder to the next hundred thousand persons who cross your path.
GARRISON KEILLOR, "Life's Variety Pack," A Prairie Home Companion, Nov. 3, 2009
Few people love with the violence they hate.
NORMAN MACDONALD, Maxims and Moral Reflections
To men of a certain type
The suspicion that they are incapable of loving
Is as disturbing to their self-esteem
As, in cruder men, the fear of impotence.
T. S. ELIOT, The Cocktail Party
Love can make people do funny things, inexplicable things. And thwarted love can turn some people into madmen--or madwomen. People who never had much of a grip on reality, sometimes they spin pretty illusions ... and when the illusion shatters, they become capable of anything.
SUSANNE ALLEYN, Game of Patience
Love leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once.
MIKHAIL BULGAKOV, The Master and Margarita
What amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy--and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.
ANNE ENRIGHT, The Gathering
LOVE QUOTES XII
Never marry but for love; but see that thou lov'st what is lovely.
WILLIAM PENN, Some Fruits of Solitude
The imagination of a eunuch dwells more and longer upon the material of love than that of man or woman ... supplying, so far as he can, by speculation, the place of pleasures he can no longer enjoy.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, journal, Apr. 4, 1831
They say love's like a bus, and if you wait long enough another one will come along, but not in this place where the buses are slow and most of the cute ones are gay.
DANIEL HANDLER, Adverbs
Loving is like music. Some instruments can go up two octaves, some four, and some all the way from black thunder to sharp lightning. As some of them are susceptible only of melody, so some hearts can sing but one song of love, while others will fun in a full choral harmony.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Life Thoughts
Whoever said "You can't buy love" probably never went into a pet shop!
TOM WILSON, Ziggy, Jan. 29, 1998
Love can smack you like a seagull, and pour all over your feet like junkmail. You can't be ready for such a thing any more than salt water taffy gets you ready for the ocean.
DANIEL HANDLER, Adverbs
Forgotten tones of love recur to us, and kind glances shine out of the past--oh so bright and clear!--oh so longed after!--because they are out of reach; as holiday music from within a prison wall--or sunshine seen through the bars; more prized because unattainable--more bright because of the contrast of present darkness and solitude, whence there is no escape.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, Esmond
Earthly love is a brief and penurious stream, which only flows in spring, with a long summer drought. The change from a burning desert, treeless, springless, drear, to green fields and blooming orchards in June, is slight in comparison with that from the desert of this world's affection to the garden of God, where there is perpetual, tropical luxuriance of blessed love.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Life Thoughts
I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms.
DANIEL HANDLER (as Lemony Snicket), The Beatrice Letters
Love rays us round as glory swathes a star,
And, from the mystic touch of lips and palms,
Streams rosy warmth!
GERALD MASSEY, "To My Wife"
When it comes to attracting men, logic escapes even the savviest of women. Probably because there is no logic involved.... You can read all the self-help books you want, you can run on a treadmill till you've reduced your tuchas to bubkes, you can stuff your face with oysters, and it won't make a bit of difference. For love, attraction, compatibility, and companionship are not a science of objectivity; they are, rather, far and away the single most subjective matter in the history of the universe. Did Cavewoman X have a romp in the cave with Caveman Y because of his universally sought-after ability to single-handedly kill a wildebeest with his bare hands and bring it to the feet of his intended? No, she probably just liked the way his mouth turned up at the corners in concentration while he chiseled out a piece of flint.
GWEN MACSAI, Lipshtick
When there is love in the heart, there are rainbows in the eyes, which cover every black cloud with gorgeous hues.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Life Thoughts
The world gets grimy and the love object is in stark relief from it's surroundings. This is love, a pretty thing on an ugly street.
DANIEL HANDLER, Adverbs
The plough of Time breaks up our Eden-land,
And tramples down its fruitful flowery prime.
Yet thro' the dust of ages living shoots
O' the old immortal seed start in the furrows;
And, where Love looked on with glorious eye,
Thes quicken'd germs of everlastingness
Flower lusty, as of old in Paradise!
GERALD MASSEY, "Wooed and Won"
Love is ownership. We own whom we love. The universe is God's because he loves.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Life Thoughts
The Maker has linked together the whole race of man with this chain of love. I like to think that there is no man but has had kindly feelings for some other, and he for his neighbour, untiwl we bind together the whole family of Adam. Nor does it end here. It joins heaven and earth together. For my friend or my child of past days is still my friend or my child to me here, or in the home prepared for us by the Father of all. If identity survives the grave, as our faith tells us, is it not a consolation to think that there may be one or two souls among the purified and just, whose affection watches us invisible, and follows the poor sinner on earth?
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, Cornhill to Cairo
When you love someone, you don't have a choice.
CASSANDRA CLARE, City of Ashes
The problem with being passionately in love ... is that it deprives you of too much sleep.
DAN SIMMONS, The Rise of Endymion
Love fades, the dreamer wakes, the dream is brief.
MAURICE BROWNE, "At Dawn"
Love is of noble birth and heavenly origin. The glory of his personality no words can describe. He is as an angel of light dwelling among the children of men.
NICIAS BALLARD COOKSEY, Helps to Happiness
Love, amid the other graces of this world, is like a cathedral tower, which begins at the earth and at the first is surrounded by the other parts of the structure. But at length, rising above buttresses, wall and arch, and parapet and pinnacle, it shoots, spire-like, many a foot right into the air, so high that the huge cross on its summit glows like a spark in the morning light, and shines like a star in the evening sky, when the rest of the pile is enveloped in darkness. So love here is surrounded by the other graces, and divides the honors with them; but they will have felt the wrap of night and of darkness, when it will shine, luminous, against the sky of eternity.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Life Thoughts
In a love affair, there is usually one person who loves, and the other qui se laisse aimer; it is only in later days, perhaps, when the treasures of love are spent, and the kind hand cold which ministered them, that we remember how tender it was; how soft to soothe; how eager to shield; how ready to support and caress. The ears my no longer hear which would have received our words of thanks so delightedly. Let us hope those fruits of love, though tardy, are yet not all too late; and though we bring our tribute of reverence and gratitude, it may be to a gravestoon, there is an acceptance even there for the stricken heart's oblation of fond remorse, contrite memories, and pious tears.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, Newcomes
When we consider the lofty character of love, and remember his wonderful helpfulness to man, it would seem that he could have no opposition in his work, nor enemies under the sun; yet there is a whole bunch of fellows who are constantly antagonizing love. Among them are anger, hatred, revenge, envy, and jealousy. Love will have no fellowship with these, and if any one of them is admitted into the heart love goes out.
NICIAS BALLARD COOKSEY, Helps to Happiness
LOVE QUOTES XIII
Oh, my young friends, how delightful is the beginning of a love-business, and how undignified, sometimes, the end!
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, The Virginians
All the world loves a lover, but how it does laugh at his love letters.
EDGAR GUEST, Home Rhymes
We love being in love, that's the truth on't. If we had not met Joan, we should have met Kate, and adored her. We know our mistresses are no better than many other women, nor no prettier, nor no wiser, nor no wittier. 'Tis not for these reasons we love a woman, or for any special quality or charm I know of; we might as well demand that a lady should be the tallest woman in the world, like the Shropshire giantess, as that she should be a paragon in any other character, before we began to love her.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, Esmond
Sometimes love makes you selfish. Sometimes it makes you stupid. Sometimes it reminds you why you love your gun.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON, Cerulean Sins
Happiest time of youth and life, when love is first spoken and returned; when the dearest eyes are daily shining welcome, and the fondest lips never tire of whispering their sweet secrets; when the parting look that accompanies "Good night!" gives delightful warning of tomorrow.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, The Virginians
Love seems to survive life, and to reach beyond it. I think we take it with us past the grave. Do we not still give it to those who have left us? May we not hope that they feel it for us, and that we shall leave it here in one or two fond bosoms, when we also are gone?
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, The Virginians
If dying, I yet live in a tender heart or two; nor am I lost and hopeless living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for me.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, Esmond
What will a man not do when frantic with love? To what baseness will he not demean himself? What pangs will he not make others suffer, so that he may ease his selfish heart?
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, Esmond
A pair of bright eyes with a dozen glances suffice to subdue a man; to enslave him, and enflame him; to make him even forget; they dazzle him so that the past becomes straightway dim to him; and he so prizes them that he would give all his life to possess 'em.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, Esmond
As the gambler said of his dice, to love and win is the best thing, to love and lose is the next best.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERY, Pendennis
Those who are gone, you have. Those who departed loving you, love you still; and you love them always. They are not really gone, those dear hearts and true; they are only gone into the next room; and you will presently get up and follow them, and yonder door will close upon you, and you will be no more seen.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, Roundabout Papers
If love lives through all life; and survives through all sorrow; and remains steadfast with us through all changes; and in all darkness of spirit burns brightly; and, if we die, deplores us for ever, and loves still equally; and exists with the very last gasp and throb of the faithful bosom--whence it passes with the pure soul, beyond death; surely it shall be immortal!
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, Newcomes
Sure, love vincit omnia; is immeasurably above all ambition, more precious than wealth, more noble than name. He knows not life who knows not that: he hath not felt the highest faculty of the soul who hath not enjoyed it.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, Esmond
When [men] see a pretty woman, and feel the delicious madness of love coming over them, they always stop to calculate her temper, her money, their own money, or suitableness for the married life.... Ha, ha, ha! Let us fool in this way no more. I have been in love forty-three times with all ranks and conditions of women, and would have married every time if they would have let me. How many wives had King Solomon, the wisest of men? And is not that story a warning to us that Love is master of the wisest? It is only fools who defy him.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, Men's Wives
To describe love-making is immoral and immodest; you know it is. To describe it as it really is, or would appear to you and me as lookers-on, would be to describe the most dreary farce, to chronicle the most tautological twaddle. To take note of sighs, hand-squeezes, looks at the moon, and so forth--does this business become our dignity as historians? Come away from those foolish young people--they don't want us; and dreary as their farce is, and tautological as their twaddle, you may be sure it amuses them, and that they are happy enough without us.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, Philip
Who does not know of eyes, lighted by love once, where the flame shines no more?--of lamps extinguished, once properly trimmed and tended? Every man has such in his house. Such momentoes make our splendidest chambers look blank and sad; such faces seen in a day cast a gloom upon our sunshine. So oaths mutually sworn, and invocations of heaven, and priestly ceremonies, and fond belief, and love, so fond and faithful that it never doubted but that it should live for ever, are all of no avail towards making love eternal: it dies, in spite of the banns and the priest; and I have often thought there should be a visitation of the sick for it, and a funeral service, and an extreme unction, and an abi in pace. It has its course, like all mortal things--its beginning, progress, and decay. It buds and it blooms out into sunshine, and it withers and ends.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, Esmond
There is no passion that more excites us to every thing that is noble and generous than virtuous Love.
WELLINS CALCOTT, Thoughts Moral and Divine
"To fall for," "to be fallen for"--I feel in these words something unspeakably vulgar, farcical, and at the same time extraordinarily complacent. Once these expressions put in an appearance, no matter how solemn the place, the silent cathedrals of melancholy crumble, leaving nothing but an impression of fatuousness. It is curious, but the cathedrals of melancholy are not necessarily demolished if one can replace the vulgar "What a messy business it is to be fallen for" by the more literary "What uneasiness lies in being loved."
OSAMU DAZAI, No Longer Human
Love's witch'ry once ensnared my heart;
Oh! how enchanting all things seemed!
My cares, and troubles, left no smart,
Elysium, all the world I deemed;
But when the fond delusion passed,
I woke to anguish long to last!
C. B. LANGSTON, "Change"
With whom shall a young lady fall in love but with the person she sees? She is not supposed to lose her heart in a dream, like a Princess in the "Arabian Nights;" or to plight her young affections to the portrait of a gentleman in the Exhibition, or a sketch in the "Illustrated London News." You have an instinct within you which inclines you to attach yourself to some one: you meet Somebody: you hear Somebody constantly praised; you walk, or ride, or waltz, or talk, or sit in the same pew at church with Somebody: you meet again, and again, and--"Marriages are made in Heaven," your dear mamma says, pinning your orange-flower wreath on, with her blessed eyes dimmed with tears--and there is a wedding breakfast, and you take off your white satin and retire to your coach-and-four, and you and he are a happy pair--Or, the affair is broken off and then, poor dear wounded heart! Why then you meed Somebody Else, and twine your young affections round number two. It is your nature so to do. Do you suppose it is all for the man's sake that you love, and not a bit for your own? Do you suppose you would drink if you were not thirsty, or eat if you were not hungry?
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, Pendennis
Oh love's sweet enchantment is common,
It rules the world everywhere;
'Tis the rose in the bosom of woman,
The bouquet that man loves to wear;
'Tis the Spirit that lightens his labour,
Or whether on land or on sea;
'Tis the charm of the pipe and the tabor,
And as dear to the slave as the free!
C. B. LANGSTON, "Love
LOVE QUOTES XIV
Oh love is the wondrous magician
That changes dull lead into gold;
If it wounds it can play the physician,
And cure both the young and the old!
Then hail to the glorious passion
That makes what is earthly, sublime!
That cares not for custom or fashion,
But dwells like an angel with time!
C. B. LANGSTON, "Love"
Oh! I know this truth, if I know no other,
That passionate Love is Pain's own mother.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, "The Way Of It"
Nothing is true but Love, nor aught of worth;
Love is the incense which doth sweeten earth.
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, "Love"
Love is the crown that glorifies; the curse
That brands and burdens; it is life and death.
It is the great law of the universe;
And nothing can exist without its breath.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, "What Love Is"
True love is like a coin, changeless and pure,
Bright from the mint of virtuous affection,
Whose solid worth lies in its gold secure
Stamped with the soul's reflection;
Through Time may mar with rude and hasty hands
Its brilliancy and beauty,
Its gold unspoiled beneath the surface stands
Alloyed with common duty.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN, "Love's Counterfeits"
Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, "Optimism"
The wine of Love can be obtained by none,
Save Him who trod the winepress all alone.
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, "Love"
Love is the impulse which directs the world,
And all things know it and obey its power.
Man, in the maelstrom of his passions whirled;
The bee that takes the pollen to the flower;
The earth, uplifting her bare, pulsing breast
To fervent kisses of the amorous sun;--
Each but obeys creative Love's behest,
Which everywhere instinctively is done.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, "What Love Is"
Need we say it was not love,
Now that love is perished?
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, "Passer Mortuus Est"
All love that has not friendship for its base,
Is like a mansion built upon the sand.
Though brave its walls as any in the land,
And its tall turrets lift their heads in grace;
Though skilful and accomplished artists trace
Most beautiful designs on every hand,
And gleaming statues in dim niches stand,
And fountains play in some flow'r-hidden place:
Yet, when from the frowning east a sudden gust
Of adverst fate is blown, or sad rains fall
Day in, day out, against its yielding wall,
Lo! the fair structure crumbles to the dust.
Love, to endure life's sorrow and earth's woe,
Needs friendship's solid masonwork below.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, "Upon the Sand"
False love is like the counterfeiter's coin,
A criminal deception.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN, "Love's Counterfeits"
Love, unconquerable,
Waster of rich men, keeper
Of warm lights and all-night vigil
In the soft face of a girl:
Sea-wanderer, forest-visitor!
Even the pure immortals cannot escape you,
And mortal man, in his one day's dusk,
Trembles before your glory.
SOPHOCLES, Antigone
Life is like a pipe, and love is the fuse.
THEOPHILUS MARZIALS, "Chelsea"
Love is as bitter as the dregs of sin,
As sweet as clover-honey in its cell;
Love is the password whereboy souls get in
To Heaven--the gate that leads, sometimes, to Hell.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, "What Love Is"
But now I know that there is no killing
A thing like Love, for it laughs at Death.
There is no hushing, there is no stilling
That which is part of your life and breath.
You may bury it deep, and leave behind you
The land, the people that knew your slain;
It will push the sods from its grave, and find you
On wastes of water or desert plain.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, "From the Grave"
One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit Redux
How does Love speak?
In the faint flush upon the telltale cheek,
And in the pallor that succeeds it; by
The quivering lid of an averted eye--
The smile that proves the parent to a sigh
Thus doth Love speak.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, "Love's Language"
Love is the centre and circumference;
The cause and aim of all things--'tis the key
To joy and sorrow, and the recompense
For all the ills that have been, or may be.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, "What Love Is
LOVE QUOTES XV
The loves of men but vary in degrees--
They find no new expression for the flame.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, "Isaura"
I don't believe you ever stop loving anyone you ever really loved. You have them there like money in the bank just because you loved them and held them in your arms or dreamed you did. You can forget a lot of things in life, but not that honey to end all honeys.
ELLEN GILCHRIST, A Dangerous Age
Love! dearest, sweetest power! how much are we indebted to thee! How much superior are even thy miseries to the pleasures which arise from other sources!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Dec. 20, 1810
The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN, Islanders and the Fisher of Men
To find love round your ways,
A shield in evil days;
A robe that keeps you warm,
As ermine, from the storm;
To wear it as a jewel-flame,
A cross of honor, with a royal name;
To sit a queen, unmoved
By want or grief--this is to be beloved.
CAROLINE SPENCER, "The Difference"
Love is the only thing that pays for birth,
Or makes death welcome. Oh, dear God above
This beautiful but sad, perplexing earth,
Pity the hearts that know--or know not--Love!
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX, "What Love Is"
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
ANAIS NIN, attributed, French Writers of the Past
Our love is a harsh cord
that binds us wounding us
and if we want
to leave our wound,
to separate,
it makes a new knot for us and condemns us
to drain our blood and burn together.
PABLO NERUDA, "The Furies"
Oh, God, I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love. I swim in the sky; I float; my body is full of flowers, flowers with fingers giving me acute, acute caresses, sparks, jewels, quivers of joy, dizziness, such dizziness. Music inside of one, drunkenness. Only closing the eyes and remembering, and the hunger, the hunger for more, more, the great hunger, the voracious hunger, and thirst.
ANAIS NIN, diary, May 30, 1934
I love Love — though he has wings,
And like light can flee.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, "Rarely, Rarely, Comest Thou"
Love was a delicious blend of warm and cold. There was comfort in making love. It solved no problems: but one could run away from problems.
LARRY NIVEN, Ringworld
Love is blindness
I don't want to see
Won't you wrap the night
Around me
Oh my heart
Love is blindness
U2, "Love Is Blindness"
Hatred stirs up dissension, but love covers over all wrongs.
PROVERBS 10:12
Love is the key to felicity, nor is there a heaven to any who love not. We enter Paradise through its gates only.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
Love is a very ancient force, which served its purpose in its day but no longer is essential for the survival of the species.
FRANK HERBERT, Heretics of Dune
I loved a being, an idea of my own mind, which had no real existence. I concreted this abstract of perfection, I annexed this fictitious quality to the idea presented by a name; the being, whom that name signified, was by no means worthy of this. This is the truth: Unless I am determinedly blind -- unless I am resolved causelessly and selfishly to seek destruction, I must see it. Plain! is it not plain? I loved a being; the being, whom I loved, is not what she was; consequently, as love appertains to mind, and not body, she exists no longer. I regret when I find that she never existed, but in my mind; yet does it not border on wilful deception, deliberate, intentional self-deceit, to continue to love the body, when the soul is no more?
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Jun. 2, 1811
When love is reached through suffering ... it has a power it can never gain through innocence.
ANNE RICE, Memnoch the Devil
Who strikes man with love -- God or the Devil?
LEONID ANDREYEV, He Who Gets Slapped
Love is clockworks
And cold steel
Fingers too numb to feel
Squeeze the handle
Blow out the candle
Love is blindness
U2, "Love Is Blindness"
There is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love.
IVAN KLIMA, Love and Garbage
Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed: such a vow in both cases, excludes us from all enquiry.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, notes, Queen Mab
True Love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright,
Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light,
Imagination! which from earth and sky,
And from the depths of human phantasy,
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills
The Universe with glorious beams, and kills
Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow
Of its reverberated lightning.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, Epipsychidion
LOVE QUOTES XVI
You ought to love all mankind; nay, every individual of mankind. You ought not to love the individuals of your domestic circles less, but to love those who exist beyond it more.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, "Essay on Christianity"
You can run from love
And if it's really love it will find you
Catch you by the heel
U2, "A Man and a Woman"
Only love makes fruitful the soul.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, Beyond
Love needs its martyrs
Needs its sacrifices
They live for your beauty
And pay for their vices
Love will be the death of
My lonely soul brothers
But their spirits shall live on in
The hearts of all lovers
DEPECHE MODE, "The Love Thieves"
Between the horses of love and lust we are trampled underfoot.
U2, "So Cruel"
All love is sweet,
Given or returned. Common as light is love,
And its familiar voice wearies not ever.
Like the wide heaven, the all-sustaining air,
It makes the reptile equal to the God;
They who inspire it most are fortunate,
As I am now; but those who feel it most
Are happier still.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, Prometheus Unbound
Love, like reputation, once fled, never returns more.
APHRA BEHN, The History of the Nun
Like thunder needs rain
Like a preacher needs pain
Like tongues of flame
Like a sweet stain
Need your love
I need your love
U2, "Hawkmoon 269"
When love comes to town I'm gonna jump that train
When love comes to town I'm gonna catch that flame.
Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down
But I did what I did before love came to town.
U2, "When Love Comes to Town"
Love's very pain is sweet,
But its reward is in the world divine
Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, Epipsychidion
You say love is a temple, love a higher law
Love is a temple, love the higher law.
You ask me to enter, but then you make me crawl
And I can't be holding on to what you got, when all you got is hurt.
U2, "One"
Strangelove
Strange highs and strange lows
Strangelove
That's how my love goes
Strangelove
Will you give it to me
Will you take the pain
I will give to you
Again and again
And will you return it
DEPECHE MODE, "Strangelove"
Love is nothing but lust misspelled.
DAN SIMMONS, Olympos
It isn't enough to love people because they're good to you, or because in some way or other you're going to get something by it. We have to love because we love loving.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, A Bit O' Love
Love's a bully, pushing and shoving
In the belly of a woman.
Heavy rhythm taking over
To stick together a man and a woman
Stick together man and a woman
Stick together.
U2, "Do You Feel Loved"
Love is the desire to give, not to receive, something. Love is the art of producing something with the other's talents.
BERTOLT BRECHT, "Love of Whom?"
In the vacuum of the heart love falls forever.
JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit is Rich
I've read more than a hundred books
Seeing love mentioned many thousand times
But despite all the places I've looked
It's still no clearer
I'm still no nearer
The meaning of love
DEPECHE MODE, "The Meaning of Love"
The belief that love is a finite essence that will eventually run out holds a certain logic for me even now, even if I am supposed to know better.
SUSANNA MOORE, The Big Girls
No friend to Love like a long voyage at sea.
APHRA BEHN, The Rover
Love could never come to full fruition till it was destroyed.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, Fraternity
This is the morning of our love
It's just the dawning of our love
I feel you
Your heart it sings
I feel you
The joy it brings
Where heaven waits
Those golden gates
And back again
You take me to
And lead me through oblivion
DEPECHE MODE, "I Feel You"
LOVE QUOTES XVII
I love you pretty baby
You're the only love I've ever known
Just as long as you stay with me
The whole world is my throne
Beyond here lies nothin'
Nothin' we can call our own
BOB DYLAN, "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'"
O what a heaven is love! O what a hell!
THOMAS DEKKER, Blurt, Master Constable
Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, November
Love, having no geography, knows no boundaries.
TRUMAN CAPOTE, Other Voices, Other Rooms
The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.
SYLVIA PLATH, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
What could be more serious than the love of man for woman, what more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers, these people entering into illusion glittering eyed, must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands.
VIRGINIA WOOLF, To the Lighthouse
Love is all there is, it makes the world go ’round
Love and only love, it can’t be denied
No matter what you think about it
You just won’t be able to do without it
Take a tip from one who’s tried
BOB DYLAN, "I Threw It All Away"
Why is the measure of love loss?
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
If they substituted the word "Lust" for "Love" in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.
SYLVIA PLATH, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Didn't love, like a plant from India, require a prepared soil, a particular temperature? Sighs in the moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over hands yielded to a lover, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness thus could not be separated from the balconies of great châteaux filled with idle amusements, a boudoir with silk blinds, a good thick carpet, full of pots of flowers, and a bed raised on a dais, nor from the sparkle of precious stones and shoulder knots on servants' livery.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Madame Bovary
I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Sexing the Cherry
People who are having a love-sex relationship are continuously lying to each other because the very nature of the relationship demands that they do, because you have to make a love object of this person, which means that you editorialize about them. You know? You cut out what you don't want to see, you add this if it isn't there. And so therefore you're building a lie.
TRUMAN CAPOTE: Conversations
The only everyday and eternal reality was love.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, One Hundred Years of Solitude
I’d go hungry, I’d go black and blue
I’d go crawling down the avenue
There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do
To make you feel my love
BOB DYLAN, "Make You Feel My Love"
Love had a thousand shapes.
VIRGINIA WOOLF, To the Lighthouse
Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?
WILLIAM FAULKNER, "Beyond"
What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I'm talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That's the size of it, the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's not containable.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Powerbook
Among all methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as this gust of feverish agitation that sweeps over us from time to time. For then the die is cast, the person whose company we enjoy at that moment is the person we shall henceforward love. It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when -- in this moment of deprivation -- the quest is for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage -- the insensate, agonizing need to possess exclusively.
MARCEL PROUST, Swann's Way
The end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Powerbook
Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that hapiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lovers's eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favourite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.
TRUMAN CAPOTE, Other Voices, Other Rooms
I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Passion
LOVE QUOTES XVIII
Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body
Love is the cheapest of religions.
CESARE PAVESE, This Business of Living, Dec. 21, 1939
Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.
UMBERTO ECO, The Island of the Day Before
There's nothing deader than a dead love.
LEONA HELMSLEY, Playboy, Nov. 1990
The Venus flytrap, a devouring organism, aptly named for the goddess of love.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Suddenly Last Summer
The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, Conversations with Samuel R. Delany
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
JORGE LUIS BORGES, "The Meeting in a Dream," Other Inquisitions
Love in the young requires as little of hope as of desire to feed upon.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, Light in August
I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.
KURT VONNEGUT, The Paris Review, spring 1977
Are not all loves secretly the same? A hundred flowers sprung from a single root.
TANITH LEE, Delirium's Mistress
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.
JANE HIRSHFIELD, "For What Binds Us"
This love of ours, in so far as it is a love for one particular creature, is not perhaps a very real thing, since, though associations of pleasant or painful musings can attach it for a time to a woman to the extent of making us believe that it has been inspired by her in a logically necessary way, if on the other hand we detach ourselves deliberately or unconsciously from those associations, this love, as though it were in fact spontaneous and sprang from ourselves alone, will revive in order to bestow itself on another woman.
MARCEL PROUST, Within a Budding Grove
Not all men are worthy of love.
SIGMUND FREUD, Civilization and Its Discontents
We value love not because it's stronger than death but because it's weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES, My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead
The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings.
PLATO, Phaedrus
No one can genuinely love the world, which is too large to love entire. To love all the world at once is pretense or dangerous self-delusion. Loving the world is like loving the idea of love, which is perilous because, feeling virtuous about this grand affection, you are freed from the struggles and the duties that come with loving people as individuals.
DEAN KOONTZ, Odd Hours
What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Passion
If you grew up in a house where you weren't loved, you didn't know there was an alternative.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES, The Marriage Plot
I don't love you any less, but I can't love you anymore.
LYLE LOVETT, "I Can't Love You Anymore"
Love is a very difficult -- occupation. You got to work at it, man. It ain't a thing every Tom, Dick and Harry has got a true aptitude for.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Period of Adjustment
There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again.
DOUGLAS ADAMS, The Salmon of Doubt
It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive manifestations of their aggressiveness.
SIGMUND FREUD, Civilization and Its Discontents
Love never goes away; it just changes form.
PAMELA ANDERSON, Esquire, Jan. 2005
If somebody says "I love you" to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? "I love you, too."
KURT VONNEGUT, Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons
Near even a candle, the visible heat.
So it is with a person in love.
JANE HIRSHFIELD, "The Visible Heat"
Love life seems to be that factor which requires the largest quantity of magical tinkering.
ISAAC ASIMOV, Foundation and Empire
When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able together to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.
MARCEL PROUST, Within a Budding Grove
A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.
AMY HEMPEL, "The Dog of the Marriage"
What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss.
UMBERTO ECO, The Name of the Rose
Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other. Throw it in the garbage and it springs up clean. Try to root it out and it only flourishes. Love is a weed, a dandelion that you poison from your heart. The taproots wait. The seeds blow off, ticklish, into a part of the yard you didn't spray. And one day, though you worked, though you prodded out each spiky leaf, you lift your eyes and dozens of fat golden faces bob in the grass.
LOUISE ERDRICH, The Bingo Palace
LOVE QUOTES XIX
We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
CYRIL CONNOLLY, The Unquiet Grave
Love is an experiment ... what happens next is always surprising.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.
GRAHAM GREENE, The Heart of the Matter
Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
G. K. CHESTERTON, attributed, Life is a Verb
The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.
ANITA BROOKNER, A Friend from England
Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.
LOUISE ERDRICH, The Plague of Doves
The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart's history.
STEFAN ZWEIG, The Burning Secret and Other Stories
Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.
MAYA ANGELOU, attributed, The Power of Hope
On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself--on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, The Second Sex
Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black. We can't tell if it will survive us. But we can be sure that it's the last thing to go.
MARTIN AMIS, The Second Plane
I am convinced the most unfortunate people are those who would make an art of love. It sours other effort. Of all artists, they are certainly the most wretched.
NORMAN MAILER, The Man Who Studied Yoga
To love another another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task ... tremendous and foolish and human.
LOUISE ERDRICH, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
When love enters, the whole spiritual constitution of a man changes, is filled with the Holy Ghost, and almost his form is altered.
D. H. LAWRENCE, Sons and Lovers
You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.
LOUISE ERDRICH, The Painted Drum
To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honour — the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two.
GRAHAM GREENE, The Quiet American
Love ... Just Nature's way of getting one person to pay the bills for another person.
JEANETTE WINTERSON, The Stone Gods
We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.
MAYA ANGELOU, A Brave and Startling Truth
When you’ve lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.
MARTIN AMIS, House of Meetings
I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.
NORMAN MAILER, Harlot's Ghost
You are wrong if you think you cannot live without love. I cannot live without it. I do not mean that I go into a decline, develop odd symptons, became a caricature. I mean that I cannot live well without it. I cannot think or act or speak or write or even dream with any kind of energy in the absence of love. I feel excluded from the living world. I become cold, fish-like, immobile. I implode.
ANITA BROOKNER, Hotel du Lac
It isn't being happy together ... that makes one love--it's being unhappy together.
GRAHAM GREENE, The Ministry of Fear
Love's a dog in a manger.
D. H. LAWRENCE, Sons and Lovers
When people love each other, when they find each other out of thousands and millions of people. It's always destiny.
SERGEI LUKYANENKO, Night Watch
We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.
GRAHAM GREENE, The End of the Affair
Love is happiness, but only when you believe it will last forever. Even though every time it turns out to be a lie, it's only faith that gives love its strength and joy.
SERGEI LUKYANENKO, Night Watch
He who is himself crossed in love is able from time to time to master his passion, for he is not the creature but the creator of his own misery; and if a lover is unable to control his passion, he at least knows that he is himself to blame for his sufferings. But he who is loved without reciprocating that love is lost beyond redemption, for it is not in his power to set a limit to that other's passion, to keep it within bounds, and the strongest will is reduced to impotence in the face of another's desire.
STEFAN ZWEIG, Beware of Pity
How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.
GRAHAM GREENE, The End of the Affair
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
G. K. CHESTERTON, "The Advantages of Having One Leg," On Lying in Bed and Other Essays
If you have love in you, it's a strength. But if you are in love, it's a weakness.
SERGEI LUKYANENKO, Day Watch
Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists.
ANITA BROOKNER, Women Writers Talk
It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.
GRAHAM GREENE, The End of the Affair
LOVE QUOTES XX
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON, Their Eyes Were Watching God
The pain of love is how slowly it dies.
K. J. PARKER, Evil for Evil
All the love and joy that a man has ever received in perception is laid up in him as the sunshine of a hundred years is laid up in the bole of the oak.
COVENTRY PATMORE, The Rod, the Root, and the Flower
Let your love flow out on all living things.
WILLIAM STYRON, Sophie's Choice
Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
ANNE CARSON, The Beauty of the Husband
Love unlocks doors and opens windows that weren't even there before.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN, The Neurotic's Notebook
Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, The Days Before
Love is the most destructive weapon of all, the only problem being how to contain and channel it into something that can be spanned, aimed and loosed.
K. J. PARKER, Devices and Desires
This is love: You stop bothering about the universal, the general, get sucked instead into the local and particular: When will I see her again? What shall we do today? Do you like these shoes? Theory and reflection are delicate old uncles bustled out of the way by the boisterous nephews action and desire. Themes evaporate, only plot remains.
GLEN DUNCAN, The Last Werewolf
This love, this mortal love, is of their own making ... the thing we did not intend, foresee or sanction. How then should it not fascinate us?... It is as if a fractious child had been handed a few timber shavings and a bucket of mud to keep him quiet only for him promptly to erect a cathedral.... Within the precincts of this consecrated house they afford each other sanctuary, excuse each other their failings, their sweats and smells, their lies and subterfuges, above all their ineradicable self-obsession. This is what baffles us, how they wriggled out of our grasp and somehow became free to forgive each other for all that they are not.
JOHN BANVILLE, The Infinities
Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame.
ANN PATCHETT, Bel Canto
The longer the road to love, the keener is the pleasure.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS, An Art of Living
In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN, The Complete Neurotic's Notebook
It is the terrible deception of love that it begins by engaging us in a play not with a woman of the outside world but with a doll inside our brain -- the only woman moreover that we have always at our disposal, the only one we shall ever possess -- whom the arbitrary power of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the Balbec of my dreams had been from the real Balbec; an artificial creation which by degrees, and to our own hurt, we shall force the real woman to resemble.
MARCEL PROUST, The Guermantes Way
Love, I find is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON, Dust Tracks on a Road
To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But, then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love, to be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy, therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness — I hope you're getting this down.
WOODY ALLEN, Love and Death
I'll tell you ... what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter -- as I did!
CHARLES DICKENS, Great Expectations
Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.
ANNE CARSON, Eros the Bittersweet
Love was altogether more predatory. It was concerned with pursuit, capture, enjoyment; it was caused by beauty, the way raw red skin is caused by the sun; it was an appetite, like hunger or thirst, a physical discomfort that tortured you until it was satisfied.
K. J. PARKER, Devices and Desires
Love born of anxiety resembles a thorn shaped so that efforts to pull it out of one's flesh merely cause it to penetrate more deeply therein.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS, An Art of Living
Love is like the sea. It's a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Love is a confidence trick, that's all. It's Nature's way of suckering a mammal with a brain and a long, vulnerable gestation period into reproducing. Humans can think, so ordinary animal-grade maternal instinct wouldn't be enough to make human women go through all that, not if they stopped and thought about what's involved. So you have love. It's a substitute for rational thought.
K. J. PARKER, Evil for Evil
Nothing is so strange when one is in love ... as the complete indifference of other people.
VIRGINIA WOOLF, Mrs. Dalloway
There is no balm of Gilead,
No salve, no soothing ointment
To stay the pain of one who's had
In love a disappointment--
Unless it be that healing lotion
Of fixing on a new devotion.
RICHARD ARMOUR, "Pastures New"
Life without Love is as a flower without fragrance.
RICHARD GARNETT, De Flagello Myrtes
Love is basically for teenagers, and when it comes to real life for grown-ups, you're far better off with someone who's moderately pleased to see you when you're around, but leaves you in peace when you've got things to do.
K. J. PARKER, Evil for Evil
Falling in love makes the unknown known. Falling out of love reverses the process.
GLEN DUNCAN, The Last Werewolf
Swift doth young Love flee,
And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream.
GEORGE MEREDITH, Modern Love
Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it.
WOODY ALLEN, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
I think love and hate are really the same thing. They're what you feel when someone matters more to you than anything else; more than yourself, even.
K. J. PARKER, Evil for Evil
In the religion of Love the courtesan is a heretic; but the nun is an atheist.
RICHARD GARNETT, De Flagello Myrtes
LOVE QUOTES XXI
Love is a religion, and its rituals cost more than those of other religions. It goes by quickly and, like a street urchin, it likes to mark its passage by a trail of devastation.
HONORE DE BALZAC, Père Goriot
Love is the garden of the young.
HERBERT KRETZMER, "A Heart Full of Love (Reprise)," Les Misérables
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex.
JULIAN BARNES, Talking It Over
Then is Love blest, when from the cup of the body he drinks the wine of the soul.
RICHARD GARNETT, De Flagello Myrtes
Love is a quality which mocks at death, which overlaps it, feeds on it, is nourished by it, and finds its roots deep down in that part of us which is both immortal and Divine.
ARTHUR FOLEY WINNINGTON-INGRAM, Thoughts on Love and Death
To me, love is a pure idea forged in flesh, awkwardly maybe, but it had to connect to somewhere, despite twists and turns of underground cable. An all-too-perfect thing. Sometimes the lines get crossed. Or you get a wrong number. But that's nobody's fault. It'll always be like that, so long as we exist in this physical form. As a matter of principle.
HARUKI MURAKAMI, Dance, Dance, Dance
Love is the most melodious of all harmonies.
HONORE DE BALZAC, Physiology of Marriage
Wail not too wildly for expiring Love:
The Love that dies was never quite alive.
RICHARD GARNETT, De Flagello Myrtes
When we fall in love, we hope--both egotistically and altruistically--that we shall be finally, truly seen: judged and approved. Of course, love does not always bring approval: being seen may just as well lead to a thumbs-down and a season in hell.
JULIAN BARNES, Nothing to Be Frightened Of
We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.
FERNANDO PESSOA, The Book of Disquiet
Sensuality often hastens the growth of love so much that the roots remain weak and are easily torn up.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Beyond Good and Evil
Love, as the poet says, is like the spring. It grows on you and seduces you slowly and gently, but it holds tight like the roots of a tree. You don't know until you're ready to go that you can't move, that you would have to mutilate yourself in order to be free. That's the feeling. It doesn't last, at least it doesn't have to. But it holds on like a steel claw in your chest. Even if the tree dies, the roots cling to you. I've seen men and women give up everything for love that once was.
WALTER MOSLEY, The Man in My Basement
Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.
HONORE DE BALZAC, A Woman of Thirty
