quotations about love
The problem with being passionately in love ... is that it deprives you of too much sleep.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
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
The world gets grimy and the love object is in stark relief from it's surroundings. This is love, a pretty thing on an ugly street.
DANIEL HANDLER
Adverbs
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
What is the science at work behind falling out of love? How does the skin of a person you made love to once start feeling strange even to touch? How do feelings that you once invested your every living breath in while expressing just get reduced to mere memories of words? How does the joy of a heart overflowing with love suddenly transforms into an empty cauldron with echoes of pain? Is love a mirage?
AMIT MEHRA
"As I Watch a Love End I Realize, Love is Always a Stowaway", The Good Men Project, March 14, 2016
When a man and woman are successfully in love, their whole activity is energized and victorious. They walk better, their digestion improves, they think more clearly, their secret worries drop away, the world is fresh and interesting, and they can do more than they dreamed that they could do. In love of this kind sexual intimacy is not the dead end of desire as it is in romantic or promiscuous love, but periodic affirmation of the inward delight of desire pervading an active life.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Morals
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
With whom shall a young lady fall in love but with the person she sees? She is not supposed to lose her heart in a dream, like a Princess in the "Arabian Nights;" or to plight her young affections to the portrait of a gentleman in the Exhibition, or a sketch in the "Illustrated London News." You have an instinct within you which inclines you to attach yourself to some one: you meet Somebody: you hear Somebody constantly praised; you walk, or ride, or waltz, or talk, or sit in the same pew at church with Somebody: you meet again, and again, and--"Marriages are made in Heaven," your dear mamma says, pinning your orange-flower wreath on, with her blessed eyes dimmed with tears--and there is a wedding breakfast, and you take off your white satin and retire to your coach-and-four, and you and he are a happy pair--Or, the affair is broken off and then, poor dear wounded heart! Why then you meet Somebody Else, and twine your young affections round number two. It is your nature so to do. Do you suppose it is all for the man's sake that you love, and not a bit for your own? Do you suppose you would drink if you were not thirsty, or eat if you were not hungry?
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Pendennis
Ah! let us love, my Love, for Time is heartless,
Be happy while you may!
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"The Lake"
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
And love is part and union in itself
Of all that is in nature, brilliant, pure--
Of all in feeling, sacred and sublime.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Festus
I loved long and long,
And grew to be out of fashion
Like an old song.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"O Do Not Love Too Long", In the Seven Woods
I really thought that love would save us all.
JOHN LENNON
attributed, The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 10, 1980
I say love, and the world populates itself with doves.
PABLO NERUDA
"Get Used to Seeing the Shadow Behind Me"
I swallowed hard. Was I ready for the Wager of Love? It was still a gamble and there would be no guarantee of happiness, but I would not remain one of the Cowards of Love scattered around me. I knew that one could not be the Empire's greatest lover without truly knowing how to love. And yet I no longer even aspired to this hollow title. I wanted only what every common husband can achieve--to be the greatest lover of my very own wife.
DOUGLAS CARLTON ABRAMS
The Lost Diary of Don Juan
I tell thee Love is Nature's second sun,
Causing a spring of virtues where he shines.
GEORGE CHAPMAN
All Fools
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
THOMAS MANN
The Magic Mountain
It may be true that love is blind, but only for what is ugly: its sight is keen enough for what is beautiful.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Love ... like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another's heart, or its flame burns low.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Love fattens on smooth words.
KATHARINE HEPBURN
Me: Stories of My Life