quotations about love
I loved long and long,
And grew to be out of fashion
Like an old song.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"O Do Not Love Too Long", In the Seven Woods
For misdirected love, the attainment of its object is, indeed, the best cure; but it cures as the guillotine cures headache.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Could there be finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very essence of love?
JANE AUSTEN
Pride and Prejudice
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"
As a drop of honey is dissipated and lost in a pail of water, so the sweet affection of love would totally vanish through too extensive a diffusion.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
And love is part and union in itself
Of all that is in nature, brilliant, pure--
Of all in feeling, sacred and sublime.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Festus
All the world loves a lover, but how it does laugh at his love letters.
EDGAR GUEST
Home Rhymes
All love's details burned bright. Surely they meant something? Surely they were enough? But they came and went and there we still were, with new unfillable space between us.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
Ah! let us love, my Love, for Time is heartless,
Be happy while you may!
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"The Lake"
A little while the rose,
And after that the thorn;
An hour of dewy morn,
And then the glamour goes.
Ah, love in beauty born,
A little while the rose!
HENRY VAN DYKE
"Roseleaf"
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"
When you've lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.
MARTIN AMIS
House of Meetings
When you love someone, you don't have a choice.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Ashes
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
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
The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings.
PLATO
Phaedrus
The heart is forever unfaithful, and the feelings of love will come and go, but true love is not about what you feel. It is about what you do.
DOUGLAS CARLTON ABRAMS
The Lost Diary of Don Juan
The girlish talk of love and lovers is henceforth stale and commonplace. The cheap jokes of the comic papers on love and its poor counterfeit, flirtation, are a blasphemy. Love-romances and love-poems have lost their charm, so inadequate are they to tell love's true story. She is herself the romance; she is herself the poem.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
She has not fallen in love. Love has been a flight, not a fall. She has risen into a new life; in her is born a new experience. Perhaps it has come suddenly, with a rush which has overwhelmed her with its tumultuous surprise. Perhaps it has grown gradually, so gradually that she has been quite unconscious of its advent until it has taken complete possession of her. As the water lily bursts open the moment the sun strikes upon it, and the rose turns from bud to blossom so gradually that the closest observation discerns no movement in the petals, so some souls bloom instantly when love touches them with its sunbeam, and others, unconscious and unobserved, pass from girlhood to womanhood. In either case it is love that works the miracle. She has not known the secret of her own heart. Or if she has known it, she cannot tell it to any one else --no, not even to herself! She only knows that within her is a secret room, wherein is a sacred shrine. But she has not the key; and what is enshrined there she will not permit even herself to know. She is a strange contradiction to herself. She is restless away from him and strangely silent in his presence, or breaks the silence only to be still more strangely voluble. She chides herself for not being herself, and has in truth become or is becoming another self. So one could imagine a green shoot beckoned imperiously by the sunlight, and neither daring to emerge from its familiar life beneath the ground nor able to resist the impulse; or a bird irresistibly called by life, and neither daring to break the egg nor able to remain longer in the prison-house of its infancy.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
Our love, too, proceeding from ourselves and returning to us, would suffice to make our life blessed, and would stand in need of no extraneous enjoyment.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God