LOVE QUOTES XXXII

quotations about love

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket -- safe, dark, motionless, airless -- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

C. S. LEWIS

The Four Loves


To love is to will the good of the other.

THOMAS AQUINAS

Summa Theologica

Tags: Thomas Aquinas


To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I.'

AYN RAND

The Fountainhead

Tags: Ayn Rand


Towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state -- admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological -- in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that "I" and "you" are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.

SIGMUND FREUD

Civilization and Its Discontents

Tags: Sigmund Freud


True love always brings joy to ourselves and to the one we love. If our love does not bring joy to both of us, it is not true love.

THICH NHAT HANH

Teachings on Love

Tags: Thich Nhat Hanh


Upon the roadway of my life,
A guide-board I will leave of love,
So those who follow in my steps
May guided be to hills above.

ARDELIA COTTON BARTON

"Love's Guide-Board"


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


Wail not too wildly for expiring Love:
The Love that dies was never quite alive.

RICHARD GARNETT

De Flagello Myrtes


We all have the seeds of love in us. We can develop this wonderful source of energy, nurturing the unconditional love that does not expect anything in return.

THICH NHAT HANH

Teachings on Love


We can love a partner but not necessarily trust them. But when we trust a partner, loving them becomes much easier.

VIKKI ZIEGLER

"The Top 7 Reasons Why Marriages Last", Huffington Post, November 14, 2017


What a mystery is love! We cannot define it; we can only indicate it by describing the occasion on which it arises in the soul. If human love is inexplicable, Divine love is an ocean too deep for the plummet of man or archangel; too broad to be bounded by the thought of the loftiest intelligence in the universe. He who knows not in his inmost consciousness the love of God, will find this book sealed to his understanding. It can only be unlocked by the key of experience. Love is not a product of the reason. It is the free play of the spiritual sensibilities in the possession of its object. God is not only love, but he is love revealed. The perfect love of God toward man is designed to call forth perfect love toward God in man's bosom. Though the mirror on which that love is reflected is broken into uneven planes and reflects s distorted image--though the human soul at its best earthly estate under grace is shattered by infirmities and incurable imperfections--yet the love which man cherishes toward God may flow with all the united force of his being. The history of God's intercourse with men is the chronicle of his love. This is the only history which will outlive time itself, and escape the conflagration which will burn up the world and all the works therein. This will be our textbook forever. We can contemplate no more sublime and ennobling theme. The brightness of the material universe pales before the splendors of the Divine character--that central fire which kindles the souls of seraphs in heaven and melts the hearts of sinners on earth. Thus the science of the divine Heart infinitely above the science of the almighty Hand.

DANIEL STEELE

"Love Revealed", Love Enthroned


What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?

JEANETTE WINTERSON

The Passion


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

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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


Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

The Passion

Tags: Jeanette Winterson


A history of listening to Top 40 radio had left me with a ridiculous and clichéd notion of love. I had never entertained the feeling myself but knew that it meant never having to say you're sorry. It was a many-splendored thing. Love was a rose and a hammer. Both blind and all-seeing, it made the world go round.

DAVID SEDARIS

Naked

Tags: David Sedaris


A man loves with more or less passion according to the number of cords which his pretty mistress binds to his heart.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

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A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills: to know that high initiation, she must often tread where it is hard to tread, and feel the chill air, and watch through darkness. It is not true that love makes things easy: it makes us choose what is difficult.

GEORGE ELIOT

Felix Holt


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"

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And you tempt me into your House of Love--
I, who have come from far
Through wintry forest and homeless heath,
Friend of the wind and star?
Ah, I fear the warmth of the ingleside
And the depths of your dear caress
Will make me forget what I learned out there
In the stubble and loneliness!

KARLE WILSON BAKER

"The Moor-child", Blue Smoke

Karle Wilson Baker (1878-1960) was an American poet and author. She was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for her last collection of poetry, Dreamers on Horseback, in 1931.

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