quotations about love
Giving and receiving love is vital to human existence. It is the glue that binds couples, families, communities, cultures, and nations.
FRANK LAWLIS
Mending the Broken Bond
My love is a bird
Happily singing on my shoulder
Would you like to be the cage
A sweet cage forever?
JINSONG GUO
"R U Still There?", Love Poems N' Quotes by Dr. Guo
Love does nothing but make you weak! It turns you into an object of pity and derision--a mewling pathetic creature no more fit to live than a worm squirming on the pavement after a hard summer rain.
TERESA MEDEIROS
The Vampire Who Loved Me
Love means not ever having to say you're sorry.
ERICH SEGAL
Love Story
Some people, right away, do know each other deeply. Love gives them insight into each other. Love makes them pledge themselves to each other. Love makes them inventive. Yes, it also makes them ridiculous. But that's just another of love's glories. It makes being ridiculous permissible.
JAMES KUZNER
"Should we scoff at the idea of love at first sight?", The Conversation, August 30, 2018
James Kuzner is Associate Professor of English at Brown University. With a specialty in early modern literature, his research tends to focus on the relationship between literature, selfhood, and political imagination.
Strange
indeed how love in other
ways so particular
will pick a corner
in that charnel-house
tidy it and coil up there, perhaps
even fall asleep--her face
turned to the wall!
CHINUA ACHEBE
Attento, Soul Brother!
To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.
WOODY ALLEN
Love and Death
He who is himself crossed in love is able from time to time to master his passion, for he is not the creature but the creator of his own misery; and if a lover is unable to control his passion, he at least knows that he is himself to blame for his sufferings. But he who is loved without reciprocating that love is lost beyond redemption, for it is not in his power to set a limit to that other's passion, to keep it within bounds, and the strongest will is reduced to impotence in the face of another's desire.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
Love is as bitter as the dregs of sin,
As sweet as clover-honey in its cell;
Love is the password whereby souls get in
To Heaven--the gate that leads, sometimes, to Hell.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"What Love Is"
Love sucks. Sometimes it feels good. Sometimes it's just another way to bleed.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Blue Moon
I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.
IRVIN D. YALOM
When Nietzsche Wept
Sexual ecstasy usually arises among dyads, or groups of two, but the ritual ecstasy of "primitives" emerged within groups generally composed of thirty or more participants. Thanks to psychology and the psychological concerns of Western culture generally, we have a rich language for describing the emotions drawing one person to another--from the most fleeting sexual attraction, to ego-dissolving love, all the way to the destructive force of obsession. What we lack is any way of describing and understanding the "love" that may exist among dozens of people at a time; and it is this kind of love that is expressed in ecstatic ritual.
BARBARA EHRENREICH
Dancing in the Streets
Without warning
as a whirlwind
swoops on an oak
Love shakes my heart
SAPPHO
Without Warning
Sappho (c. 630 - c. 570 BC) was a Greek poet from the island of Lesbos. Although most of her poetry is now lost, she was regarded in ancient times as one of the greatest lyric poets and given names such as the "Tenth Muse" and "The Poetess," just as Homer was called "the Poet."
To go through life without love is to travel through the world in a carriage with closed windows.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
BIBLE
Leviticus 19:18
Love, amid the other graces of this world, is like a cathedral tower, which begins at the earth and at the first is surrounded by the other parts of the structure. But at length, rising above buttresses, wall and arch, and parapet and pinnacle, it shoots, spire-like, many a foot right into the air, so high that the huge cross on its summit glows like a spark in the morning light, and shines like a star in the evening sky, when the rest of the pile is enveloped in darkness. So love here is surrounded by the other graces, and divides the honors with them; but they will have felt the wrap of night and of darkness, when it will shine, luminous, against the sky of eternity.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Mother love is the most powerful, the most irrational force on earth, even more powerful than sexual love. However, one does lead to the other, so best not to spurn the former.
RITA MAE BROWN
Full Cry
Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.
BIBLE
John 15:13
Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
ANNE CARSON
The Beauty of the Husband
Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing there trembling? Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is its beauty.... People with no imagination feed it with sex -- the clown of love. They don't know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that -- softly, without props.
TONI MORRISON
Love