quotations about love
A man in love prefers his passion to every other consideration, and is fonder of his mistress than he is of virtue. Should she prove vicious, she makes vice lovely in his eyes.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
Sure, love vincit omnia; is immeasurably above all ambition, more precious than wealth, more noble than name. He knows not life who knows not that: he hath not felt the highest faculty of the soul who hath not enjoyed it.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
Love is a quality which mocks at death, which overlaps it, feeds on it, is nourished by it, and finds its roots deep down in that part of us which is both immortal and Divine.
ARTHUR FOLEY WINNINGTON-INGRAM
Thoughts on Love and Death
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
When you love someone, you don't have a choice.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Ashes
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
Love is the secret you unmask yourself to find; it is the foundation of the spiritual life, the destination where all roads of the journey lead.
ELIZABETH LESSER
The Seeker's Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure
In love, the quickest is always the best cure.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Love rays us round as glory swathes a star,
And, from the mystic touch of lips and palms,
Streams rosy warmth!
GERALD MASSEY
"To My Wife"
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
Love, in this world, is like a seed taken from the tropics, and planted where the winter comes too soon; and it cannot spread itself in flower-clusters and wide-twining vines, so that the whole air is filled with the perfume thereof. But there is to be another summer for it yet. Care for the root now, and God will care for the top by and by.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
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
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
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
Every genuine expression of love grows out of a consistent and total surrender to God.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Christmas sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, 1957
We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.
MAYA ANGELOU
A Brave and Startling Truth
The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings.
PLATO
Phaedrus
How far above all price Love's costly wine,
Which can the meanest chalice make divine!
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH
"Love"
I've never had my heart broken ... It's a very sad state of affairs. I think everybody should have their heart broken. I don't think it says anything good about me at all ... My lover and my best friend and my partner has been my work. But I certainly would in life have wanted to know--would like to know--what it was like to have a real partner.
SALLY FIELD
Good Housekeeping, Mar. 2009
I am coming to terms with the fact that loving someone requires a leap of faith, and that a soft landing is never guaranteed.
SARAH DESSEN
This Lullaby