quotations about love
The true coronation of character is love. The true test of love is self-sacrifice. He knows not how to love who knows not how to suffer for love's sake. The love that costs nothing is worth--what it costs.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
Love is the most melodious of all harmonies.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Our earthly loves are but so many silver steps leading us up to the great golden love of God.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
In love, the quickest is always the best cure.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
O little hour of Love, so wild and sweet!
I gave the world, thy honey-dew to eat;
And now the tear-sown pathway of the dead
Echoes the patter of thy flying feet.
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love
To men of a certain type
The suspicion that they are incapable of loving
Is as disturbing to their self-esteem
As, in cruder men, the fear of impotence.
T. S. ELIOT
The Cocktail Party
It is only the souls that do not love that go empty in this world.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary
The girlish talk of love and lovers is henceforth stale and commonplace. The cheap jokes of the comic papers on love and its poor counterfeit, flirtation, are a blasphemy. Love-romances and love-poems have lost their charm, so inadequate are they to tell love's true story. She is herself the romance; she is herself the poem.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
I don't love you any less, but I can't love you anymore.
LYLE LOVETT
"I Can't Love You Anymore", The Road to Ensenada
Great Love has many attributes, and shrines
For varied worshippers, but his force divine
Shows most its many-named fulness in the man
Whose nature multitudinously mixed--
Each ardent impulse grappling with a thought--
Resists all easy gladness, all content
Save mystic rapture, where the questioning soul
Flooded with consciousness of good that is
Finds life one bounteous answer.
GEORGE ELIOT
The Spanish Gypsy
Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.
FRED ROGERS
The World According to Mister Rogers
Love is a quality which mocks at death, which overlaps it, feeds on it, is nourished by it, and finds its roots deep down in that part of us which is both immortal and Divine.
ARTHUR FOLEY WINNINGTON-INGRAM
Thoughts on Love and Death
Love's dream, too, knows decay;
Awhile the soul-harp's wildly thrilling strain
Pours out those notes we ne'er forget again,
And the deep fountains of the heart burst forth
As if to gladden every spot of earth;
But O! it will not stay.
MARY T. LATHRAP
"Song of the Earth-Weary"
Ah! let us love, my Love, for Time is heartless,
Be happy while you may!
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"The Lake"
Love speaks a language most sublime,
Its idioms known in every clime.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Love's Language"
Love's language everywhere is known.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Love's Language"
Love knows no law.
PORTUGUESE PROVERB
We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.
MAYA ANGELOU
A Brave and Startling Truth
They do best, who if they cannot but admit love, yet make it keep quarters; and sever it wholly from their serious affairs, and actions, of life; for if it check once with business, it troubleth men's fortunes, and maketh men, that they can no ways be true to their own ends.
SIR FRANCIS BACON
"Of Love", Essays, or Counsels Civil and Moral
When you get in love you are made all over again. The person who loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass. So there are two you's, the one you create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't be any difference between the two you's or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
Four Quarters, 1970