LOVE QUOTES XXXIX

quotations about love

How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.

GRAHAM GREENE

The End of the Affair


You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

LOUISE ERDRICH

The Painted Drum


From the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreathes heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this--love; while the women ... would all the time be feeling, this is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

To the Lighthouse

Tags: Virginia Woolf


Love alone was left, as a great image of a dream that was erased.

ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE

"The Valley", Poetical Meditations

Tags: Alphonse de Lamartine


Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

ANAIS NIN

attributed, French Writers of the Past

Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903 - January 14, 1977) was a French-Cuban American diarist, essayist, novelist and writer of short stories and erotica. Nin's most studied works are her diaries or journals, which detail her marriages to Hugh Parker Guiler and Rupert Pole, in addition to her numerous affairs, including those with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and writer Henry Miller.

Tags: Anais Nin


Ah, my friends, Love, like a froward boy, with his hands full of sugar-plums, still cries for more.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought

Tags: Christian Nestell Bovee


Love endeth like the chianti flask, its drops are bitter.

GELETT BURGESS

The Maxims of Methuselah


Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
Is--Love, forgive us!--cinders, ashes, dust;
Love in a palace is perhaps at last
More grievous torment than a hermit's fast.

JOHN KEATS

"Lamia"


When does love cease? When one begins to love anew.

LAURA ESQUIVEL

The Law of Love

Tags: Laura Esquivel


Be worthy love, and love will come.

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT

Little Women


Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

A Testament of Hope


The ideal of romantic love stands in opposition to much of our history, as we shall see. First of all, it is individualistic. It rejects the view of human beings as interchangeable units, and it attaches the highest importance to individual differences as well as to individual choice. Romantic love is egoistic, in the philosophical, not in the petty, sense. Egoism as a philosophical doctrine holds that self-realization and personal happiness are the moral goals of life, and romantic love is motivated by the desire for personal happiness. Romantic love is secular. In its union of physical with spiritual pleasure in sex and love, as well as in its union of romance and daily life, romantic love is a passionate commitment to this earth and to the exalted happiness that life on earth can offer.

NATHANIEL BRANDEN

The Psychology of Romantic Love


Love is of noble birth and heavenly origin. The glory of his personality no words can describe. He is as an angel of light dwelling among the children of men.

NICIAS BALLARD COOKSEY

Helps to Happiness


I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.

NORMAN MAILER

Harlot's Ghost


Life without Love is as a flower without fragrance.

RICHARD GARNETT

De Flagello Myrtes

Tags: Richard Garnett


Love brooks no delay.

ROMAN PROVERB


Oh, love. Love is best of all. There is no such total element, not even pain. Who has ever loved, knows this. I need not say more.

TANITH LEE

Mortal Suns


Love born of anxiety resembles a thorn shaped so that efforts to pull it out of one's flesh merely cause it to penetrate more deeply therein.

ANDRE MAUROIS

An Art of Living


I tell thee Love is Nature's second sun,
Causing a spring of virtues where he shines.

GEORGE CHAPMAN

All Fools

Tags: George Chapman


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