quotations about love
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
You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
November
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
Love, slow and gradual in its growth, is too much like friendship ever to be a violent passion.
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.
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
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
True love is a durable fire,
In the mind ever burning.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
As Ye Came from the Holy Land
Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1552 - 1618) was an English writer, poet, soldier, politician, courtier, spy, and explorer. He is also well known for popularizing tobacco in England.
We don't believe in rheumatism and true love until after the first attack.
MARIE VON EBNER-ESCHENBACH
Aphorisms
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (September 13, 1830 - March 12, 1916) was an Austrian writer noted for her excellent psychological novels. She portrayed life among both the poor and the aristocratic.
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"
Edwin Leibfreed published several books of poetry, including A Garland of Verse (1910), A Soliloquy of Life (1915), and The Man of a Thousand Loves (1932).
Love--that divine fire which was made to light and warm the temple of home--sometimes burns at unholy altars.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
To go through life without love is to travel through the world in a carriage with closed windows.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
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
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.--A sentiment we all entertain for ourselves, and occasionally imagine others entertain for us.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke
Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.
JOHN DONNE
The Anagram
Love will have its day.
U2
"North and South of the River", Staring at the Sun
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", Rattle and Hum
When love is reached through suffering ... it has a power it can never gain through innocence.
ANNE RICE
Memnoch the Devil
Love will sacrifice more to others than friendship, but then it exacts more from them.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
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