quotations about love
The affections are like lightning: you cannot tell where they will strike till they have fallen.
HENRI-DOMINIQUE LACORDAIRE
attributed, A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern
Nothing goes far which has not the wings of love to make it buoyant, so that it can fly.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex.
JULIAN BARNES
Talking It Over
Becoming addicted to love isn't uncommon. The chemicals released during that first phase are the same or similar to those released when consuming cocaine or drinking alcohol. And for some people the desire to feel that way all the time can be hard to resist.
KURT SMITH
"Yes, it is Possible to Be Addicted to Love", beliefnet, August 8, 2018
Love sometimes elevates, creates new qualities, suspends the working of evil inclinations; but only for a day. Love, then, is an Oriental despot, whose glance lifts a slave from the dust, and then consigns him to it again.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles", The Writings of Madame Swetchine
Love fades, the dreamer wakes, the dream is brief.
MAURICE BROWNE
"At Dawn"
Ah, love is a voyage with water and a star,
in drowning air and squalls of precipitate bran;
love is a war of lights in the lightning flashes,
two bodies blasted in a single burst of honey.
PABLO NERUDA
Morning XII
If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another's; if we feel, we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood. This is Love.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"On Love", Essays and Letters
Love is not some mushy feeling for your parents that you are born with, or a romanticized sexuality you learn from magazines. It is action. If you know what love is you can never be in doubt about whether someone loves you or you love someone.
PETER ABRAHAMS
The Fury of Rachel Monette
Love's wing moults when caged and captured,
Only free, he soars enraptured.
THOMAS CAMPBELL
Freedom and Love
If you listen to neurologists and psychiatrists, you'd never fall in love.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Changing My Mind, Among Others
Some things you can feel coming. You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. When you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.
UMBERTO ECO
Foucault's Pendulum
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
attributed, Zen Soup: Tasty Morsels of Wisdom from Great Minds
The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
Islanders and the Fisher of Men
Should I draw you the picture of my heart, it would be what I hope you still would love, though it contained nothing new. The early possession you obtained there, and the absolute power you have ever maintained over it, leave not the smallest space unoccupied.
ABIGAIL ADAMS
letter to John Adams, December 23, 1782
I'll tell you ... what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter -- as I did!
CHARLES DICKENS
Great Expectations
Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.
DAN SIMMONS
The Fall of Hyperion
How does Love speak?
In the faint flush upon the telltale cheek,
And in the pallor that succeeds it; by
The quivering lid of an averted eye--
The smile that proves the parent to a sigh
Thus doth Love speak.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Love's Language"
Love defies all calculation. We are not judicious in love; we do not select those whom we ought to love, but those whom we cannot help loving.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
attributed, Proust Was a Neuroscientist
Man loves most that which is his own.
HENRY ADAMS
Historical Essays