quotations about love
Love makes you do crazy things. Right, and alcohol makes you drink too much. It's romantic to think that love is this uncontrollable force that sweeps us off our feet. "You can't help whom you love." "I can't help myself, I'm in love." "I have no choice but to love you." That all sounds amazing, until we consider that an uncontrollable force can't be promised or predicted. We can't commit to love that we're not responsible for. We can't give love that we don't own. If a gust of wind knocked you off your feet, you couldn't turn and offer that wind to the person behind you for as long as you both shall live. So maybe the most romantic thing someone can say to you is, "I have full capacity over all my faculties. I'm in total control. I'm thinking very clearly. I'm choosing to give you my love, because you deserve it."
JULIE MITCHELL
"Love is not written in the stars", Corsicana Daily Sun, November 6, 2017
Mysterious love, uncertain treasure, hast thou more of pain or pleasure! Chill'd with tears, kill'd with fears, endless torments dwell about thee: yet who would live, and live without thee!
JOSEPH ADDISON
Rosamond
You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Deathless
In love, all the contradictions of existence merge themselves and are lost. In love loss and gain are harmonised. In its balance sheet, credit and debit accounts are in the same column and gifts are added to gains.
SWAMI ABHEDANANDA
"Realisation in Love", The Free Press Journal, August 21, 2018
Life is too short to not spend it with the people you love, I murmured. Did you just read an Instagram caption? my boyfriend asked. I huffed. I said that it was a midnight musing--not an Instagram caption. But it's true. To me, at least. From reading children's books to books about death and illness and meaning and regret, I gather that this abstraction--love!--that poets wax on about and singers warble on about and writers scribble on about is what matters most. It isn't money or material items or career or achievements or resumé markers or positions or charm. It's the simple, deceptively simple! equation of existence: to love and to be loved.
LU
"To Love and To Be Loved", coolpeppermint, June 8, 2018
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will some new pleasure prove
Of golden sands, and crystal brooks,
With silken lines, and silver hooks.
JOHN DONNE
The Bait
Enjoyment inflames love in some men, and extinguishes it in others: the wind that assists large vessels, upsets small ones.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
It is a wonderful subduer, this need of love--this hunger of the heart--as peremptory as that other hunger by which Nature forces us to submit to the yoke, and change the face of the world.
GEORGE ELIOT
The Mill on the Floss
Love between a man and woman is war.
AUGUST STRINDBERG
The Father
Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame.
ANN PATCHETT
Bel Canto
Love is more than just saying nice words and doing things -- it means forgetting oneself and serving others, just as Jesus did when he washed the feet of the disciples.
POPE FRANCIS
"Love is the hidden service we do for others, Pope Francis says", Angelus: The Tidings Online, March 14, 2016
In a competition of love we'll all share in the victory, no matter who comes first.
MUHAMMAD ALI
The Soul of a Butterfly
Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.
HONORE DE BALZAC
A Woman of Thirty
The truth about love is that it is ever changing. Throughout the life of a relationship, individuals change and life itself changes. Love has to be flexible enough to accommodate new information, new roles, and new ways of loving one another.
PATRICIA LOVE
The Truth About Love
The Venus flytrap, a devouring organism, aptly named for the goddess of love.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
Suddenly Last Summer
We value love not because it's stronger than death but because it's weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead
Ah, how sweet it is to love!
Ah, how gay is young Desire!
And what pleasing pains we prove
When we first approach Love's fire!
JOHN DRYDEN
Tyrannic Love
In the beginning, love is all you know. You don't know it is love, of course, all you know is that some soft, good-smelling person holds you, feeds you, talks to you and empties your pants when they are full. As you age you come to realize this feeling is, indeed, love, and mommy and daddy become the center of your universe. You love them more than anything, other than your dog, your bike and your sister, of course, if you must. It is an all-encompassing, all-consuming love that warms you like the sun and sustains you like the air you breathe. And that brand of love is all you know until one day a blonde girl across the classroom bats her eyes at you or a dark-eyed boy in the hall gives you a crooked, pimply grin, and your insides turn to warm mush. At first you think you might have gotten a bad taco at lunch, but no, it is love.
JEFF MULLIN
"Love is a lifelong thrill ride", Enid News, February 14, 2016
Love is a tenuous, halting, delicate dance at first, a gentle gavotte, a pas de deux of fits and starts and sweaty palms and nervous smiles. But when you fall, really fall, it is like topping that first high hill on a roller coaster, when the nerves give way to a breathless ride punctuated by dips and dives and moments when your stomach feels as if it is trying to escape through your throat.
JEFF MULLIN
"Love has many facets; abuse isn't one of them", Enid News & Eagle, October 21, 2018
Love leads to marriage, that leads to divorce
That leads to lawyers, expensive, of course
Private detectives who watch all your moves
That leads to charges which nobody proves
If there are children you hear from the court
Father can't see them but pays their support
Love is the start of it, I want no part of it
Love leads to marriage, divorce and to lawyers
Detectives and charges, supporting love children
A youngster in school falls
And only a fool falls
In love
IRVING BERLIN
"Love Leads to Marriage"