quotations about love
To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I.'
AYN RAND
The Fountainhead
The stage is more beholding to love, than the life of man; for as to the stage, love is even matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief; sometimes like a siren, sometimes like a fury.
JOHN LOCKE
"Of Love", The Conduct of the Understanding: Essays, Moral, Economical, and Political
Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marring the whole girl.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
attributed, The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations
For me the cosmic aeons lie complete,
O Love, between thy forehead and thy feet!
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love
The belief that love is a finite essence that will eventually run out holds a certain logic for me even now, even if I am supposed to know better.
SUSANNA MOORE
The Big Girls
The ultimate fact of the universe is love; and its sway is all-comprehensive, and absolutely certain of final victory.
FRANK CUMMINS LOCKWOOD
Robert Browning
Love is many things and sometimes we are never really sure if it even exists, but all I know is that if you were to show me her soul in a photograph, I wouldn't even ask to see the others.
CHRISTOPHER POINDEXTER
Remington Typewriter Poetry
Hatred stirs up dissension, but love covers over all wrongs.
BIBLE
Proverbs 10:12
Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that hapiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lovers's eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favourite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
Other Voices, Other Rooms
If you love someone, then your freedom is curtailed. If you love someone, you give up much of your privacy. If you love someone, then you are no longer merely one person but half of a couple. To think or behave any other way is to risk losing that love.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Obsidian Butterfly
When we fall in love, we hope--both egotistically and altruistically--that we shall be finally, truly seen: judged and approved. Of course, love does not always bring approval: being seen may just as well lead to a thumbs-down and a season in hell.
JULIAN BARNES
Nothing to Be Frightened Of
A history of listening to Top 40 radio had left me with a ridiculous and clichéd notion of love. I had never entertained the feeling myself but knew that it meant never having to say you're sorry. It was a many-splendored thing. Love was a rose and a hammer. Both blind and all-seeing, it made the world go round.
DAVID SEDARIS
Naked
Love ... must come suddenly, with great thunderclaps and bolts of lightning -- a hurricane from heaven that drops down on your life, overturns it, tears away your will like a leaf, and carries your whole heart off with it into the abyss.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
None but those who have loved can be supposed to understand the oratory of the eye, the mute eloquence of a look, or the conversational powers of the face. Love's sweetest meanings are unspoken; the full heart knows no rhetoric of words, and resorts to the pantomime of sighs and glances.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Once you love someone it's like cancer. It spreads and spreads until it eats you up.
ANN WUEHLER
Interviews With Loneliness
Have you ever wondered why you feel more energetic and generally healthier when you're in love? That sparkle in the eyes of those in love isn't mythical or just a fancy twist of words. Love is a visceral experience, and your body chemistry changes because of it. It is an antidote to illnesses and actually increases one's life span.
PRACHI GANGWANI
"I Hypothalamus You: Love Is In the Brain Not Heart", iDiva, August 4, 2016
Our love is about small days to build memories upon, simple adventures we experience together.
LINDSAY DETWILER
"True Love Is Built In The Simple Moments", Huffington Post, October 22, 2017
Thou demandest what is love? It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"On Love", Essays and Letters
Forgotten tones of love recur to us, and kind glances shine out of the past--oh so bright and clear!--oh so longed after!--because they are out of reach; as holiday music from within a prison wall--or sunshine seen through the bars; more prized because unattainable--more bright because of the contrast of present darkness and solitude, whence there is no escape.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
Are not all loves secretly the same? A hundred flowers sprung from a single root.
TANITH LEE
Delirium's Mistress