quotations about love
To love is for the Soul to choose a companion, and travel with it along the perilous defiles and winding ways of life; mutually sustaining, when it is rugged with obstructions, and mutually rejoicing, when rich broad plains and sunny slopes make journeying delight.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
The Lives and Works of Goethe
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
Love is ... knowing that, should it come to it, they would want you to hollow out their corpse and use the carcass as a one-man tent to keep warm. Should it come to it.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016
Burning with tender love is not really an image for someone who has warmed mercury over a gentle flame. In slowness, gentleness, and hope we have the hidden force of moral perfection and of material transmutation.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Formation of the Scientific Mind
Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
The Days Before
It is not love that he feels for me. It is more like a constant resentment that has become such a habit to him that to have it removed, like an aching tooth, brings him no relief.
PHILIPPA GREGORY
The Boleyn Inheritance
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
God designs people's emotions so you fall in love with people who, in return, wouldn't even use your hollowed-out skull for a spittoon.
SCOTT ADAMS
Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!
Since to be loved endures,
To love is wise.
ROBERT BRIDGES
Since to be Loved Endures
Love is blind; couch not his eyes.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
Ranthorpe
Love--what a volume in a word, an ocean in a tear,
A seventh heaven in a glance, a whirlwind in a sigh,
The lightning in a touch, a millennium in a moment,
What concentrated joy or woe in blest or blighted love!
For it is that native poetry springing up indigenous to Mind,
The heart's own-country music thrilling all its chords,
The story without an end that angels throng to hear,
The word, the king of words, carved on Jehovah's heart!
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Love is love's reward.
JOHN DRYDEN
Palamon and Arcite
Perhaps love's greatest gift--that it is indeed unconditional--is also its greatest curse.
KRISTIN ARMSTRONG
O Magazine, Feb. 2007
There's love, sweet love, for one and all--
For love is best for great and small.
MAUD LINDSAY
"Inside the Garden Gate", Mother Stories
One who possesses such immense power over our existence will inspire awe that easily threatens to overwhelm us, even if we believe he will never abandon or destroy us.... Its grandeur makes us feel both powerful and powerless--not just to possess the loved one--but in our existence itself: the existence which we yearn for love to anchor. To be in a relationship of love is, in other words, always a relationship of fear; indeed, the greater the love the greater the fear.
SIMON MAY
Love: A History
Love and death were what novels were about.
OAKLEY HALL
Love and War in California
Love is a flower that grows in any soil, works its sweet miracles undaunted by autumn frost or winter snow, blooming fair and fragrant all the year, and blessing those who give and those who receive.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
Love is what you've been through with somebody.
JAMES THURBER
Life Magazine, Mar. 14, 1960
Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
G. K. CHESTERTON
attributed, Life is a Verb
Love dwindles by pairing.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought