LOVE QUOTES XII
quotations about love
Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Brothers Karamazov
Many think that love is about always being on the same page with our partner, feeling romantic and living in harmony. Threats to these experiences can feel like obstacles that get in the way of love. But love is as much about the obstacles as it is about the bliss. Love is accepting difference, recovering from conflict and tolerating discord. Fundamentally, love is allowing your partner to be entirely who they are, even when their very being needles you to the core. It is a profound acceptance of the personhood of your lover, while dropping your need for them to be anything different. Yes, it's a tall order. But who said it was going to be easy?
AARON BALICK
"What is love -- can it really be defined and explained?", The Guardian, February 12, 2016
We love but once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Unquiet Grave
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY
Wind, Sand and Stars
I love the one who punishes me well.
ANNE RICE
Beauty's Release
Love is a warm brain, not a leaping heart.
TIM LEBBON
Face
Love is the medicine of all moral evil. By it the world is to be cured of sin.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
In order to be loved, we have to love, which means we have to understand.
THICH NHAT HANH
Teachings on Love
This love, this mortal love, is of their own making ... the thing we did not intend, foresee or sanction. How then should it not fascinate us?... It is as if a fractious child had been handed a few timber shavings and a bucket of mud to keep him quiet only for him promptly to erect a cathedral.... Within the precincts of this consecrated house they afford each other sanctuary, excuse each other their failings, their sweats and smells, their lies and subterfuges, above all their ineradicable self-obsession. This is what baffles us, how they wriggled out of our grasp and somehow became free to forgive each other for all that they are not.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities
Of all the compound passions, which proceed from a mixture of love and hatred with other affections, no one better deserves our attention, than that love, which arises betwixt the sexes, as well on account of its force and violence, as those curious principles of philosophy, for which it affords us an uncontestable argument. It is plain, that this affection, in its most natural state, is derived from the conjunction of three different impressions or passions, viz. The pleasing sensation arising from beauty; the bodily appetite for generation; and a generous kindness or good-will. The origin of kindness from beauty may be explained from the foregoing reasoning. The question is how the bodily appetite is excited by it.
DAVID HUME
"Of the Amorous Passion, or Love Betwixt the Sexes", A Treatise of Human Nature
Maybe the act of love came too late. As a career move, I should have lost my burdensome virginity at thirteen or fourteen, when there would have been no question of lasting attachment and no desire for one. As it was, I shook when I removed my clothes and I cried after it was done, not out of pain or disappointment but out of an up-rush of muddling emotion which twenty-four hours later I was ready to call love.
HILARY MANTEL
An Experiment in Love
Earthly love is a brief and penurious stream, which only flows in spring, with a long summer drought. The change from a burning desert, treeless, springless, drear, to green fields and blooming orchards in June, is slight in comparison with that from the desert of this world's affection to the garden of God, where there is perpetual, tropical luxuriance of blessed love.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
To love someone is to long to be loved by that someone.
CHRIS SEIDMAN
Little Buddy
Love is always having to say you're sorry.
BRENDAN O'CONNOR
"Love is ...", The Independent, February 15, 2016
Love is a spy who is plotting treason,
In league with that warm, red rebel, the Heart.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Communism"
Love: noun. The force that allows us to overcome our seemingly irreconcilable differences and empowers us to experience the peace of one-ness.
BURT GERSHATER
"Inner Heroes", Arizona Daily Sun, August 20, 2018
Love has become but a dream and desire in minds free to dream and desire the unattainable. Love has become the great make-believe of adult play. Love is an imaginary pirouette amidst the lock-steps of realities. Love is a luxuriating in the racial cradle of temperament. Love is a cunning dipsomania carried about in public like the black bottle hugged beneath an old lady's shawl. Love is many things, and plays strange roles in the mind of humanity today; and for the indulgence of its delicate emotional calisthenics man has provided the theater and books and many other brilliant exploitations of lucrative fiction.
MARIAN COX
"The Fools of Love", The Dry Rot of Society and Other Essays
Oh love, rose made wet by mermaids and foams, fire that dances and climbs up the invisible stairs and awakens the blood in the tunnel of sleeplessness.
PABLO NERUDA
"The Month of March Returns with its Hidden Light"
It is not the healthy, the confident, the proud, the joyous, the happy, that one must love -- they have no need of one's love! Arrogant and indifferent, they accept love only as homage that is theirs to command, as their due. The devotion of another is to them a mere embellishment, an ornament for the hair, a bracelet on the arm, not the whole meaning and bliss of their lives. Only those with whom life has dealt hardly, the wretched, the slighted, the uncertain, the unlovely, the humiliated, could really be helped by love. He who devotes his life to them atones to them for what life has taken from them. They alone know how to love and be loved as one should love -- gratefully and humbly.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear.
BIBLE
I John 4:18