quotations about love
I say love, and the world populates itself with doves.
PABLO NERUDA
"Get Used to Seeing the Shadow Behind Me"
When you love someone
you have to let them go.
It's the only way to keep them.
MACRINA WIEDERKEHR
Seasons of Your Heart
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"
A man in love is incomplete until he has married--then he's finished.
ZSA ZSA GABOR
Newsweek, Mar. 28, 1960
Ah! let us love, my Love, for Time is heartless,
Be happy while you may!
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"The Lake"
No fruit has a more precise marked period of maturity, than love; if neglected to be gathered at that time, it will certainly fall to the ground and die away.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
Love is an artful arrangement of artless pretensions, whereby we labor to appear innocent in what we desire to be most cunning.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
Love, unconquerable,
Waster of rich men, keeper
Of warm lights and all-night vigil
In the soft face of a girl:
Sea-wanderer, forest-visitor!
Even the pure immortals cannot escape you,
And mortal man, in his one day's dusk,
Trembles before your glory.
SOPHOCLES
Antigone
To find love round your ways,
A shield in evil days;
A robe that keeps you warm,
As ermine, from the storm;
To wear it as a jewel-flame,
A cross of honor, with a royal name;
To sit a queen, unmoved
By want or grief--this is to be beloved.
CAROLINE SPENCER
"The Difference"
Oh, God, I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love. I swim in the sky; I float; my body is full of flowers, flowers with fingers giving me acute, acute caresses, sparks, jewels, quivers of joy, dizziness, such dizziness. Music inside of one, drunkenness. Only closing the eyes and remembering, and the hunger, the hunger for more, more, the great hunger, the voracious hunger, and thirst.
ANAIS NIN
diary, May 30, 1934
Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903 - January 14, 1977) was a French-Cuban American diarist, essayist, novelist and writer of short stories and erotica. Nin's most studied works are her diaries or journals, which detail her marriages to Hugh Parker Guiler and Rupert Pole, in addition to her numerous affairs, including those with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and writer Henry Miller.
Love is clockworks
And cold steel
Fingers too numb to feel
Squeeze the handle
Blow out the candle
Love is blindness
U2
"Love Is Blindness", Achtung Baby
This love of ours, in so far as it is a love for one particular creature, is not perhaps a very real thing, since, though associations of pleasant or painful musings can attach it for a time to a woman to the extent of making us believe that it has been inspired by her in a logically necessary way, if on the other hand we detach ourselves deliberately or unconsciously from those associations, this love, as though it were in fact spontaneous and sprang from ourselves alone, will revive in order to bestow itself on another woman.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings.
PLATO
Phaedrus
Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Plague of Doves
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
Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.
ANNE CARSON
Eros the Bittersweet
If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus.
EMMA GOLDMAN
"The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation"
Love is a jeering mime.
KENNETH RAND
"Ante Lucem"
Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
You don't need scores of suitors. You need only one ... if he's the right one.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women