quotations about love
Love is like a good piece of wood: It just gets stronger and stronger as the years go by.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Christmas Train
Our love, too, proceeding from ourselves and returning to us, would suffice to make our life blessed, and would stand in need of no extraneous enjoyment.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God
Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you?
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Lighthousekeeping
Love knoweth no laws.
JOHN LYLY
Euphues
Love is said to be an involuntary passion, and it is, therefore, contended that it cannot be resisted. This is true in part only, for like all things else, when nourished and supplied plentifully with ailment, it is rapid in its progress; but let these be withdrawn and it may be stifled in its birth or much stinted in its growth.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to Eleanor Parke Custis, Jan. 16, 1795
The gospel of love spread among a sex for the needs of militarism and the labor market has filled woman with the spiritual hysteria of apostleship.
MARIAN COX
"The Fools of Love", The Dry Rot of Society and Other Essays
The kind of love my mum talks about is full of worry and work and forgiving people and putting up with things and stuff like that. It's not a lot of fun, that's for sure. If that really is love, the kind my mum talks about, then nobody can ever know if they love somebody, can they? It seems like what she's saying is, if you're pretty sure you love somebody, the way I was sure in those few weeks, then you can't love them, because that isn't what love is. Trying to understand what she means by love would do your head in.
NICK HORNBY
Slam
True love survives all shocks: an affection originally produced by admiration for unusual beauty may not only survive the loss of that beauty, but may become more intense if the beauty has changed into ugliness through causes that bind the lovers together in tender associations.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
Our earthly loves are but so many silver steps leading us up to the great golden love of God.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Love not only occupies the higher lobes of the brain, but crowds out the lower to make room for its expansion.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
The problem with being passionately in love ... is that it deprives you of too much sleep.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
If love lives through all life; and survives through all sorrow; and remains steadfast with us through all changes; and in all darkness of spirit burns brightly; and, if we die, deplores us for ever, and loves still equally; and exists with the very last gasp and throb of the faithful bosom--whence it passes with the pure soul, beyond death; surely it shall be immortal!
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Newcomes
Nothing is true but Love, nor aught of worth;
Love is the incense which doth sweeten earth.
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH
"Love"
You can run from love
And if it's really love it will find you
Catch you by the heel
U2
"A Man and a Woman", How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Plague of Doves
The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart's history.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The Burning Secret and Other Stories
Nothing is so strange when one is in love ... as the complete indifference of other people.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Mrs. Dalloway
I think love and hate are really the same thing. They're what you feel when someone matters more to you than anything else; more than yourself, even.
K. J. PARKER
Evil for Evil
Love is a religion, and its rituals cost more than those of other religions. It goes by quickly and, like a street urchin, it likes to mark its passage by a trail of devastation.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Pere Goriot