quotations about love
Love--that divine fire which was made to light and warm the temple of home--sometimes burns at unholy altars.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
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 built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.
JOHN DONNE
The Anagram
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
We're all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness -- and call it love -- true love.
ROBERT FULGHUM
True Love
If I'm meant to love people, I should love everyone.
What kind of tide can an ocean bestow
if it picks and chooses the rocks it's willing to touch?
SARAH LINDSAY
"Aunt Lydia Practices Loving Komodo Dragons", Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower
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 will have its day.
U2
"North and South of the River", Staring at the Sun
Love is blindness
I don't want to see
Won't you wrap the night
Around me
Oh my heart
Love is blindness
U2
"Love Is Blindness", Achtung Baby
Like thunder needs rain
Like a preacher needs pain
Like tongues of flame
Like a sweet stain
Need your love
I need your love
U2
"Hawkmoon 269", Rattle and Hum
Love, like reputation, once fled, never returns more.
APHRA BEHN
The History of the Nun
Aphra Behn (1640 - 1689) was an English playwright, poet, and novelist from the Restoration era. As one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, she broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors.
Why does a man who is truly in love insist that this relationship must continue and be "lifelong"? Because life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. Who would want to wake up halfway through an operation?
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, Jan. 19, 1938
LOVE.--A sentiment we all entertain for ourselves, and occasionally imagine others entertain for us.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke
Love lives in sealed bottles of regret.
SEAN O'FAOLAIN
Saturday Evening Post, Aug. 13, 1966
Pains of love be sweeter far
Than all other pleasures are.
JOHN DRYDEN
Tyrannic Love
In this day and age, love is temporary and marriage is unnatural--the product of Madison Avenue advertising executives and television producers.
MICHAEL PALMER
The Fifth Vial
Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.
UMBERTO ECO
The Island of the Day Before
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."
Love, having no geography, knows no boundaries.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
Other Voices, Other Rooms
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