quotations about love
Love is the endless verb; a relationship encompassing the ultimate in holiness. Love does conquer death because in its moment lived it's eternal in nature. Love gives us our purpose, and is our ultimate memorial.
MITCHELL HURVITZ
"Perspectives: Love is tangible presence of God", Greenwich Time, October 27, 2017
Don't you feel something magical when you're in love?... I do, I certainly do ... but I think that feeling of magic is a hardwired psychological response. It's a chemical thing in the brain. It's a flow of chemicals and electrical currents, and it developed over millions of years in the process of evolution to aid in the procreation of the species.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Ghost
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
Falling in Love, as modern biology teaches us to believe, is nothing more than the latest, highest, and most involved exemplification, in the human race, of that almost universal selective process which Mr. Darwin has enabled us to recognise throughout the whole long series of the animal kingdom. The butterfly that circles and eddies in his aerial dance around his observant mate is endeavouring to charm her by the delicacy of his colouring, and to overcome her coyness by the display of his skill. The peacock that struts about in imperial pride under the eyes of his attentive hens, is really contributing to the future beauty and strength of his race by collecting to himself a harem through whom he hands down to posterity the valuable qualities which have gained the admiration of his mates in his own person. Mr. Wallace has shown that to be beautiful is to be efficient; and sexual selection is thus, as it were, a mere lateral form of natural selection--a survival of the fittest in the guise of mutual attractiveness and mutual adaptability, producing on the average a maximum of the best properties of the race in the resulting offspring. I need not dwell here upon this aspect of the case, because it is one with which, since the publication of the 'Descent of Man,' all the world has been sufficiently familiar.
GRANT ALLEN
"Falling in Love", Falling in Love and Other Essays
The measure of love is to have no mean, the end to be everlasting.
JOHN LYLY
Euphues and His England
So soon as this want or power [of love] is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"On Love", Essays and Letters
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
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
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
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
Let me tell you the story of right hand-left hand. It's a tale of good and evil. Hate: it was with this hand that Cain iced his brother. Love: these five fingers, they go straight to the soul of man. The right hand: the hand of love. The story of life is this: static. One hand is always fighting the other hand, and the left hand is kicking much ass. I mean, it looks like the right hand--Love--is finished. But hold on, stop the presses; the right hand is coming back. Yeah, he got the left hand on the ropes now, that's right. Ooh, it's a devastating right and Hate is hurt. He's down. Left-Hand Hate KO-ed by Love.
SPIKE LEE
Do the Right Thing
There is nothing like young love. It is exciting, it is stimulating, and it is often the most complicated. Why? Because the two of you are still on a path of self-discovery, defining yourselves and trying to define a combined relationship at the same time.
ZANE
Dear G. Spot
In the religion of Love the courtesan is a heretic; but the nun is an atheist.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
Then is Love blest, when from the cup of the body he drinks the wine of the soul.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
Wail not too wildly for expiring Love:
The Love that dies was never quite alive.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
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
Love is impartial and universal in its adaptation and bestowals. It is the open fount which cries, 'Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.'
MARY BAKER EDDY
"Love that finds solutions", Christian Science Monitor, April 6, 2016
Love is never free ... It is the most expensive emotion we have.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Burnt Offerings
No wound is worse than counterfeited love.
SOPHOCLES
Antigone
Love was a country he knew nothing about.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country