quotations about love
The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart's history.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The Burning Secret and Other Stories
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
Love isn't like money--the more you give away the more you get back, and the more you have to give.
S. M. STIRLING
The Sunrise Lands
Nothing is true but Love, nor aught of worth;
Love is the incense which doth sweeten earth.
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH
"Love"
I say love, and the world populates itself with doves.
PABLO NERUDA
"Get Used to Seeing the Shadow Behind Me"
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 is a jeering mime.
KENNETH RAND
"Ante Lucem"
Any love is enveloping and potentially dangerous; after all, you are putting your heart into someone else's hands and with that an incredible power to cause pain of various kinds (and vice versa). That's a given. But there is an additional absolutism about first love, when you have nothing to compare it with. You don't know anything, yet you feel you know everything -- this can be calamitous.
JULIAN BARNES
interview, The Guardian, January 29, 2018
For, without love, pleasure withers quickly, becomes a foul taste on the palate, and pleasure's inventions are soon exhausted.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
I tell thee Love is Nature's second sun,
Causing a spring of virtues where he shines.
GEORGE CHAPMAN
All Fools
In love two individuals share the same interest--each being interested only in the other's welfare.
B. V. TRIPURARI
"Love Is the Answer", Huffington Post, March 29, 2016
This love is a lichen....
etching on the unmoved rock
the only rune it knows.
SARAH LINDSAY
"Stubbornly", Twigs and Knucklebones
The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings.
PLATO
Phaedrus
Love is blind, but not the neighbors.
MEXICAN PROVERB
Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
A Testament of Hope
When you love someone
you have to let them go.
It's the only way to keep them.
MACRINA WIEDERKEHR
Seasons of Your Heart
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
Love is a great beautifier.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
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
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