quotations about love
Here is one of the most beautiful effects of love, its confidence not only in the present, but in the future as well. Cynics may declare that it is only the deceitful way nature uses to make human beings perform her will. To such a view all lovers are indifferent. In their confidence they bind themselves to one another, not for a day only, not even for a lifetime, but for eternity.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Love", Reactions and Other Essays Discussing Those States of Feeling and Attitude of Mind That Find Expression In Our Individual Qualities
The kind of love my mum talks about is full of worry and work and forgiving people and putting up with things and stuff like that. It's not a lot of fun, that's for sure. If that really is love, the kind my mum talks about, then nobody can ever know if they love somebody, can they? It seems like what she's saying is, if you're pretty sure you love somebody, the way I was sure in those few weeks, then you can't love them, because that isn't what love is. Trying to understand what she means by love would do your head in.
NICK HORNBY
Slam
Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet.
TOM ROBBINS
Still Life with Woodpecker
Tom Robbins (born July 22, 1932) is an American novelist best known for his novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which was made into a movie in 1993 starring Uma Thurman, Lorraine Bracco, and Keanu Reeves.
In seeing there is love, in being seen there is abhorrence. One grins, trying to bear the pain of being seen. But not just anyone can be someone who only looks. If the one who is looked at looks back, then the person who was looking becomes the one who is looked at.
KOBO ABE
The Box Man
My Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis, for object, strange and high;
It was begotten by Despair,
Upon Impossibility.
ANDREW MARVELL
The Definition of Love
What is the science at work behind falling out of love? How does the skin of a person you made love to once start feeling strange even to touch? How do feelings that you once invested your every living breath in while expressing just get reduced to mere memories of words? How does the joy of a heart overflowing with love suddenly transforms into an empty cauldron with echoes of pain? Is love a mirage?
AMIT MEHRA
"As I Watch a Love End I Realize, Love is Always a Stowaway", The Good Men Project, March 14, 2016
Love is not wanting the other to become a clone of ourselves. 'Other' offers resistance, pushing us to find what is self. Love is actively embracing our equality and pushing each other to realise our full potential and make our full contribution to the world.
HOWARD JONES
"What is love -- can it really be defined and explained?", The Guardian, February 12, 2016
Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone -- but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.
BETTE DAVIS
The Lonely Life
Son, if a maiden love thee, thou shalt appear handsome in her sight; she shall praise thine eyes, and the corners of thy mouth, yea, she shall admire thy hands. Though thou wert even as the orangutan yet shall she paint thee with fancies.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
Love endeth like the chianti flask, its drops are bitter.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
Love is a negative form of hatred.
ROGER ZELAZNY
This Immortal
The sweetness of human love is to be compared, therefore, to the sweetness of a flower, whose glowing colors and voluptuous fragrance are intended by Nature to attract the winged insects, whose visits are necessary for the fertilization of the seed. The color fades, the flower falls, the perfume vanishes, death soon follows after; but Nature is not mocked.
ARTHUR FOLEY WINNINGTON-INGRAM
"Love's Nature", Thoughts on Love and Death
From the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreathes heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this--love; while the women ... would all the time be feeling, this is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
Love is a barren sea, bitter and deep;
And though she saw all heaven in flower above,
She would not love.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
"A Leave-taking"
A lover is like a firefly,
lighting your life for a moment,
then leaving you to deal with the darkness
Until it flashes again.
RICH REITH
"Soulmate"
Need we say it was not love,
Now that love is perished?
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
"Passer Mortuus Est"
It is best to be off with the old love before you are on with the new.
DANISH PROVERB
One love drives out another.
SPANISH PROVERB
Love lives in palaces as well as in thatched huts.
JAPANESE PROVERB
You are wrong if you think you cannot live without love. I cannot live without it. I do not mean that I go into a decline, develop odd symptoms, became a caricature. I mean that I cannot live well without it. I cannot think or act or speak or write or even dream with any kind of energy in the absence of love. I feel excluded from the living world. I become cold, fish-like, immobile. I implode.
ANITA BROOKNER
Hotel du Lac