quotations about love
Love is a great beautifier.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
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
Pere Goriot
Love is a very contradiction of all the elements of our ordinary nature -- it makes the proud man meek -- the cheerful, sad -- the high-spirited, tame; our strongest resolutions, our hardiest energy fail before it. Believe me, you cannot prophesy of its future effect in a man from any knowledge of his past character.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Eugene Aram: A Tale
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
Love is harsh, and it consumes. And more than anything, it demands sacrifice.
TIM LEBBON
Unnatural Selection
Love is in that moment when you're in separate rooms trying to get the kids to sleep, and you unexpectedly get butterflies in your stomach because you're excited that you get to hang out with your best friend soon. It's in that conversation on the couch in your sweatpants eating Pad Thai out of a box while you exchange stories about things your children did and replay videos of them being adorable even though they've only been asleep for five minutes.
RASHA RUSHDY
"Love Is Sweatpants and Take-out, Actually", Huffington Post, February 14, 2016
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?"
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"
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
JOHN DONNE
The Sun Rising
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
Never seek to tell thy love
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind does move
Silently, invisibly.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Poems from Blake's Notebook
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
The only way to experience love is to buy it and have it installed in your head. But, like most technology, its shelf-life is limited.
GERMAIN LUSSIER
"Love Is a Gadget in This Upcoming Scott Eastwood Film", Gizmodo, August 15, 2016
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
We perceive when love begins and when it declines by our perplexity when alone.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Affections", Les Caractères
Jean de La Bruyère (16 August 1645 - 11 May 1696) was a French philosopher and moralist noted for his satire. His Caractères, which appeared in 1688, captures the psychological, social, and moral profile of French society of his time.
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 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
When you've lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.
MARTIN AMIS
House of Meetings
You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love.
ROLAND BARTHES
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
Are you a man? Then don't disgrace your manhood and go "moping" about because a worthless girl has "jilted" you, and sacrificed truth and honour to her inclination for the time being. You have heard that there are supposed to be as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. I believe there are better; try and catch them, and be thankful for the escape you have had. If you are a man, don't try to drown your grief with the brandy bottle, you might as well drown it in the river; but act like one, and your mind will soon be at ease. Young women, if any of you have been cast off by a thing in man's garb, fret not, you can easily get a better, and remember you have the deep sympathy of every man worthy the name who knows how you have been treated. Parents, it is your duty to watch over your children, and much of the above sort of pain that is in the world endured, might be avoided.
T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH
"On Requited Love", Short Essays