quotations about love
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
Love is the poetry of the senses. It has the destiny of all that which is great in man and of all that which proceeds from his thought. Either it is sublime, or it is not. When once it exists, it exists forever and goes on always increasing. This is the love which the ancients made the child of heaven and earth.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
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
When there is love, you can live even without happiness.
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
Notes From Underground
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
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
In order to be loved, we have to love, which means we have to understand.
THICH NHAT HANH
Teachings on Love
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
If thou love thine equal, it is no conquest; if thy superior, thou shalt be envied; if thine inferior, laughed at. If one that is beautiful, her colour will change before thou get thy desire; if one that is wise, she will overreach thee so far that thou shalt never touch her; if virtuous, she will eschew such fond affection; if deformed, she is not worthy of any affection; if she be rich, she needeth thee not; if poor, thou needest not her. If old, why shouldst thou love her; if young, why should she love thee?
JOHN LYLY
Euphues and His England
Oh love is the wondrous magician
That changes dull lead into gold;
If it wounds it can play the physician,
And cure both the young and the old!
Then hail to the glorious passion
That makes what is earthly, sublime!
That cares not for custom or fashion,
But dwells like an angel with time!
C. B. LANGSTON
"Love"
Love is like the sea. It's a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Their Eyes Were Watching God
The longer the road to love, the keener is the pleasure.
ANDRE MAUROIS
An Art of Living
Love makes its votaries wretched beings whose souls are not within their own keeping. Therefore man demands to be free to love in order to become cured of love and woman demands to be free to love in order to live for love: and herein the calamitous disparity.
MARIAN COX
"The Fools of Love", The Dry Rot of Society and Other Essays
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
Love is a spy who is plotting treason,
In league with that warm, red rebel, the Heart.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Communism"
There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear.
BIBLE
I John 4:18
Love's tendrils round the heart doth twine,
As round the oak doth cling the vine.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Love's Language"
Love is a warm brain, not a leaping heart.
TIM LEBBON
Face