quotations about love
Love receives its death-wound from aversion, and forgetfulness buries it.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Affections", Les Caractères
Jean de La Bruyère (16 August 1645 - 11 May 1696) was a French philosopher and moralist noted for his satire. His Caractères, which appeared in 1688, captures the psychological, social, and moral profile of French society of his time.
One word
Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is love.
SOPHOCLES
Oedipus at Colonus
Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.
GEORGE ELIOT
Silas Marner
Swift doth young Love flee,
And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream.
GEORGE MEREDITH
Modern Love
Tell not thy previous loves to a woman, lest she also telleth thee hers.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
The measure of love is to have no mean, the end to be everlasting.
JOHN LYLY
Euphues and His England
There is no passion that more excites us to every thing that is noble and generous than virtuous Love.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Though she had been besieged, courted, and pursued by men who had fallen in love with her, she did not in her heart believe in the existence of love. It seemed to her as unreal as the painted drop scenes, the temples of love, and the banks of roses that formed the settings for her dances. But though she was cold and insensitive to love, she was esteemed a wonderful mistress. She herself practiced love as a duty imposed by her profession, a part to be played that might sometimes please but always fatigued her and called for a high degree of art.
VICKI BAUM
Grand Hotel
To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task ... tremendous and foolish and human.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
Viewed from the supposed heights of reason, someone else's great love looks rather ordinary.
MINA SAMUELS
"Truly, Madly, Deeply--A Fable Explains Why Love is Crazy", Huffington Post, October 31, 2017
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
Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
Hero and Leander
Woman has been trained to stake her all upon love, to dream and plan and wait and focusu life's Multitudinousness upon love's little glamour. And the inquiry is as pertinent now as ever before to ask is such a policy of life propitious to woman's happiness or evolution? Or, if one may not be allowed to take such a pagan view of woman's destiny, to ask is it essential to the happiness or evolution of man?
MARIAN COX
"The Fools of Love", The Dry Rot of Society and Other Essays
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"For What Binds Us"
Caressing reassures lovers that their love endures.
WITTER BYNNER
"Rose-Time"
First we love within, then we love the world.
ELIZABETH LESSER
The Seeker's Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure
For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.
GEORGE ELIOT
Daniel Deronda
Have you heard the word is love?
It's so fine, it's sunshine.
THE BEATLES
"The Word", Rubber Soul
The Beatles were an English rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960. Rooted in skiffle, beat, and 1950s rock and roll, their sound incorporated elements of classical music and traditional pop in previously unheard-of ways. The band later explored music styles ranging from ballads and Indian music to psychedelia and hard rock.
Love ... must come suddenly, with great thunderclaps and bolts of lightning -- a hurricane from heaven that drops down on your life, overturns it, tears away your will like a leaf, and carries your whole heart off with it into the abyss.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head