quotations about love
In our culture, love is romanticized as a mystifying, random whirl of passion that happens to a person. Falling in love is thought to be the culmination of love. Yet, love is only meaningful and lasting when a person chooses to love responsibly and welcomes the opportunity to allow love to grow and deepen with time.
ROKELLE LERNER
Affirmations for the Inner Child
If we love a person, we love him, and whatever he may do will not affect our love. It may cause us pain if he does evil, because we love him; it may cause us sorrow and suffering; but it cannot affect our love.
C. W. LEADBEATER
The Hidden Side of Christian Festivals
If you want to be loved, then love.
ROMAN PROVERB
In the end what will prevail is your passion not your tale, for love is the Holy Grail.
TOM ROBBINS
Villa Incognito
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.
Our experience of love is more of a measure of whether we're connected with the universal source of this energy. In other words, there's some life energy that we have and sort of share with people we might be relating to that takes place, that operates whether we're sort of feeling in a state of love or not. But love is the measure of whether we're really connected with the internal source of this energy where we can consciously sort of fill up and amplify the amount of energy that we're able to take in from the inside.
JAMES REDFIELD
interview with Janice Stensrude, Mar. 24, 1994
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
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
The wine of Love can be obtained by none,
Save Him who trod the winepress all alone.
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH
"Love"
Love is the crown that glorifies; the curse
That brands and burdens; it is life and death.
It is the great law of the universe;
And nothing can exist without its breath.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"What Love Is"
Those who are gone, you have. Those who departed loving you, love you still; and you love them always. They are not really gone, those dear hearts and true; they are only gone into the next room; and you will presently get up and follow them, and yonder door will close upon you, and you will be no more seen.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Roundabout Papers
Loving is like music. Some instruments can go up two octaves, some four, and some all the way from black thunder to sharp lightning. As some of them are susceptible only of melody, so some hearts can sing but one song of love, while others will fun in a full choral harmony.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Looking back, I should have known better than to accompany Hugh to a love story. Such movies are always a danger, as unlike battling aliens or going undercover to track a serial killer, falling in love is something most adults have actually experienced at some point in their lives. The theme is universal and encourages the viewer to make a number of unhealthy comparisons, ultimately raising the question "Why can't our lives be like that?" It's a box best left unopened, and its avoidance explains the continued popularity of vampire epics and martial-arts extravaganzas.
DAVID SEDARIS
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
It may be true that love is blind, but only for what is ugly: its sight is keen enough for what is beautiful.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Love's a fire that needs renewal
Of fresh beauty for its fuel.
THOMAS CAMPBELL
Freedom and Love
I say love, and the world populates itself with doves.
PABLO NERUDA
"Get Used to Seeing the Shadow Behind Me"
Love is said to be an involuntary passion, and it is, therefore, contended that it cannot be resisted. This is true in part only, for like all things else, when nourished and supplied plentifully with ailment, it is rapid in its progress; but let these be withdrawn and it may be stifled in its birth or much stinted in its growth.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to Eleanor Parke Custis, Jan. 16, 1795
Love ... like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another's heart, or its flame burns low.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
I shall be loved as quiet things
Are loved--white pigeons in the sun,
Curled yellow leaves that whisper down
One after one;
The silver reticence of smoke
That tells no secret of its birth
Among the fiery agonies
That turn the earth.
KARLE WILSON BAKER
"I Shall Be Loved as Quiet Things"
Karle Wilson Baker (1878-1960) was an American poet and author. She was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for her last collection of poetry, Dreamers on Horseback, in 1931.
Love is never finished expressing itself.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos