quotations about love
Love and blindness are twin sisters.
RUSSIAN PROVERB
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
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
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
Each act of love is a demonstration of the powerful right use of the heart, the example of our oneness of loving our brother as ourself. It is everything that transforms the present moment into love's miracle. It is you and me in resonance vibrating ever forward with love.
MELANIE LUTZ
"Love is Meant to be put Into Right Use Full Ness", BeliefNet, November 2, 2017
I've found out that falling in love doesn't have anything to do with time. It can take a year or an instant. It happens when it's ready to happen.
NORA ROBERTS
The Calhouns
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Love could never come to full fruition till it was destroyed.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
Fraternity
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 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
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
Love and death were what novels were about.
OAKLEY HALL
Love and War in California
Love's wing moults when caged and captured,
Only free, he soars enraptured.
THOMAS CAMPBELL
Freedom and Love
We need to cooperate to survive, to subsist, to learn, to reproduce and to raise our children. Romantic and parental love is essentially the neurochemical reward for cooperating, which is cognitively quite difficult.
ANNA MACHIN
"What is love? You asked Google -- here's the answer", The Guardian, July 11, 2018
Love seems to beautify and inspire all nature. It raises the earthly caterpillar into the ethereal butterfly, it paints the feathers in spring, it lights the glowworm's lamp, it wakens the song of birds, and inspires the poet's lay. Even inanimate Nature seems to feel the spell, and flowers glow with the richest colours.
JOHN LUBBOCK
The Use of Life
Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul.
JAMES JOYCE
notes for his play Exiles
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
"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
Since to be loved endures,
To love is wise.
ROBERT BRIDGES
Since to be Loved Endures
Some sigh and cry for love
Ah, but in Pa-ree they die for love
Some waste away for love
Just the same -- hooray for love!
LEO ROBIN
"Hooray for Love"