LOVE QUOTES XVII
quotations about love
If somebody says "I love you" to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? "I love you, too."
KURT VONNEGUT
Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons
Love is not some mushy feeling for your parents that you are born with, or a romanticized sexuality you learn from magazines. It is action. If you know what love is you can never be in doubt about whether someone loves you or you love someone.
PETER ABRAHAMS
The Fury of Rachel Monette
Man loves most that which is his own.
HENRY ADAMS
Historical Essays
The weight of love
Has buoyed me up
Till my head
Knocks against the sky.
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
O Magazine, Feb. 2007
To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
Graziella: A Story of Italian Love
With the secularization of the Western world, we are turning to romantic love to give us what we once looked for in the realm of the divine. Transcendence, meaning, wholeness, and ecstasy.
ESTHER PEREL
"A top couples' therapist says our 'religion of romantic love' is making relationships harder", Business Insider, November 10, 2017
At the beginning of a relationship we love with 100 percent of our heart. However, once we are hurt, we think that if we only love with 50 percent of our heart, it will not get hurt as much the next time around. But we end up getting hurt just as much. We have to give our relationship our full attention. We should not be afraid of love.
ANDREA BRISENO
"True love is built from broken pieces", The Rampage Online, March 28, 2016
Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully.
ZIG ZIGLAR
See You at the Top
If one loves, one need not have an ideology of love.
BRUCE LEE
The Warrior Within: The Philosophies of Bruce Lee
If you have given up your heart ... you have already lost. A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast.
STEPHEN KING
The Drawing of the Three
Love is a king who reigns without laws.
SPANISH PROVERB
Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.
ELLEN KEY
"The Morality of Woman"
Love is... carefully curated ignorance.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Human Condition
Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others. As long as its spell lasts, the only in-between which can insert itself between two lovers is the child, love's own product. The child, this in-between, to which the lovers now are related and which they hold in common, is representative of the world in that it also separates them; it is an indication that they will insert a new world into the existing world. Through the child, it is as though the lovers return to the world from which their love had expelled them. But this new worldliness, the possible result and the only possibly happy ending of a love affair, is, in a sense, the end of love, which must either overcome the partners anew or be transformed into another mode of belonging together.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Human Condition
When people say, "God is love," I think they mean that love is extremely important, or that God really wants us to love. But in Christian conception, God really has love as his essence.
TIMOTHY KELLER
The Reason for God
All you need is love. And a tiara. And maybe a cookie.
ANONYMOUS
Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections, as leaves are to the life of trees. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
American Note-Books, Mar. 9, 1853
Free-market free love is simultaneously a utopian idea and a dystopian idea. The idea of total sexual freedom is an ideal, but then it's also a Michel Houellebecq nightmare. Now online dating and apps have made that normal. Everyone is "on the market" or "off the market"; friends with "benefits," "investing" time--these are all economic metaphors.
MOIRA WEIGEL
"Love in a Time of Capital: An Interview With Moira Weigel", The Nation, August 29, 2016
If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another's; if we feel, we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood. This is Love.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"On Love", Essays and Letters