LOVE QUOTES XXIII

quotations about love

love quote

Tell not thy previous loves to a woman, lest she also telleth thee hers.

GELETT BURGESS

The Maxims of Methuselah

Tags: Gelett Burgess


The loves of men but vary in degrees--
They find no new expression for the flame.

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

"Isaura"


A lover is often most unjustly ridiculed for investing the woman for whom he has a passion, with qualities and feelings that she may not in reality possess; but in this, as in most cases, the world delights to judge unkindly; for it ought not to be overlooked that he is merely clothing the idol of his affections with his own beautiful conceptions of what she should be--transferring to her a superiority of sentiment which, in fact, belongs to himself, since it must have existed in his own mind before it could have been brought forward to adorn that of another. The pleasures of the world are all in imagination, else what a curse would existence be!

CHARLES WILLIAM DAY

The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos


Love seems to beautify and inspire all nature. It raises the earthly caterpillar into the ethereal butterfly, it paints the feathers in spring, it lights the glowworm's lamp, it wakens the song of birds, and inspires the poet's lay. Even inanimate Nature seems to feel the spell, and flowers glow with the richest colours.

JOHN LUBBOCK

The Use of Life

Tags: John Lubbock


Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

Hero and Leander

Tags: Christopher Marlowe


I've found out that falling in love doesn't have anything to do with time. It can take a year or an instant. It happens when it's ready to happen.

NORA ROBERTS

The Calhouns


No one can genuinely love the world, which is too large to love entire. To love all the world at once is pretense or dangerous self-delusion. Loving the world is like loving the idea of love, which is perilous because, feeling virtuous about this grand affection, you are freed from the struggles and the duties that come with loving people as individuals.

DEAN KOONTZ

Odd Hours

Tags: Dean Koontz


Oh, my young friends, how delightful is the beginning of a love-business, and how undignified, sometimes, the end!

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

The Virginians


We need to cooperate to survive, to subsist, to learn, to reproduce and to raise our children. Romantic and parental love is essentially the neurochemical reward for cooperating, which is cognitively quite difficult.

ANNA MACHIN

"What is love? You asked Google -- here's the answer", The Guardian, July 11, 2018


"To fall for," "to be fallen for"--I feel in these words something unspeakably vulgar, farcical, and at the same time extraordinarily complacent. Once these expressions put in an appearance, no matter how solemn the place, the silent cathedrals of melancholy crumble, leaving nothing but an impression of fatuousness. It is curious, but the cathedrals of melancholy are not necessarily demolished if one can replace the vulgar "What a messy business it is to be fallen for" by the more literary "What uneasiness lies in being loved."

OSAMU DAZAI

No Longer Human

Tags: Osamu Dazai


Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

The Looking Glass War

Tags: John le Carré


I'd call it love if love didn't take so many years but lust too is a jewel.

ADRIENNE RICH

Necessities of Life

Tags: Adrienne Rich


Love can flourish only as long as it is free and spontaneous; it tends to be killed by the thought of duty. To say that it is your duty to love so-and-so is the surest way to cause you to hate him of her.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

Marriage and Morals

Tags: Bertrand Russell


I want love on demand. Take it away when it hurts, but deliver it when desired, straight to my door.

HEIDI K. ISERN

"The responsibility to fall out of love is on you", Quartz, August 5, 2016


It is the terrible deception of love that it begins by engaging us in a play not with a woman of the outside world but with a doll inside our brain -- the only woman moreover that we have always at our disposal, the only one we shall ever possess -- whom the arbitrary power of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the Balbec of my dreams had been from the real Balbec; an artificial creation which by degrees, and to our own hurt, we shall force the real woman to resemble.

MARCEL PROUST

The Guermantes Way

Tags: Marcel Proust


Love is all around you and all you have to do is claim it.

PATRICIA LOVE

The Truth About Love

Tags: Patricia Love


Of all things in this world love is the most unmanageable. Parents and guardians are sadly foiled when they undertake to guide and coerce it: and the best thing they can do with it is to leave it to itself.

ROBERT BELL

The Ladder of Gold

Tags: Robert Bell


When love grows diseas'd, the best thing we can do is to put it to a violent death; I cannot endure the torture of a ling'ring and consumptive passion.

GEORGE ETHEREGE

The Man of Mode

Tags: George Etherege


When they speak of it, this love of theirs, they speak as of a kind of grand mal brought on catastrophically by a bacillus unknown to science but everywhere present in the air about us, like the tuberculosis spore, and to which all but the coldest constitutions are susceptible.

JOHN BANVILLE

The Infinities

Tags: John Banville


When we hear complaints of the wretchedness or vanity of human life, the proper answer to them would be that there is hardly any one who at some point or other has not been in love. If we consider the high abstraction of this feeling, its depth, its purity, its voluptuous refinement, even in the meanest breast, how sacred and how sweet it is, this alone may reconcile us to the lot of humanity. That drop of balm turns the bitter cup to a delicious nectar.

WILLIAM HAZLITT

Characteristics