quotations about love
Love cannot in its very nature be peaceful or content. It is a restlessness, an unsatisfaction. I can grant a lasting love just as I can grant a lasting unsatisfaction; but the lasting love cannot be coupled with possession, for love is pain and desire and possession is easement and fulfilment.
JACK LONDON
The Kempton-Wace Letters
A man loves with more or less passion according to the number of cords which his pretty mistress binds to his heart.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.
GEORGE ELIOT
Silas Marner
Many of us want love to be wrapped up in an attractive package with all the bells, whistles, hugs and kisses. I know I do. Father God, please let my mate be smart, kind, generous, a dreamer but a doer, mentally stable, financially free, an advocate and a consumer of therapy, and also, can he look like Idris Elba, please, and thanks! But that's not always what love is. Realistically, that's not even what like is!
DANIELLE YOUNG
"OWN's Love Is ____ Aims to Redefine #RelationshipGoals", The Grapevine, June 26, 2018
To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I.'
AYN RAND
The Fountainhead
Some people will only love you as long as you fit in their box. Don't be afraid to disappoint.
ANONYMOUS
Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists.
ANITA BROOKNER
attributed, Women Writers Talk
Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.
ANATOLE FRANCE
The Garden of Epicurus
In a love affair, there is usually one person who loves, and the other qui se laisse aimer; it is only in later days, perhaps, when the treasures of love are spent, and the kind hand cold which ministered them, that we remember how tender it was; how soft to soothe; how eager to shield; how ready to support and caress. The ears my no longer hear which would have received our words of thanks so delightedly. Let us hope those fruits of love, though tardy, are yet not all too late; and though we bring our tribute of reverence and gratitude, it may be to a gravestone, there is an acceptance even there for the stricken heart's oblation of fond remorse, contrite memories, and pious tears.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Newcomes
Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?
WILLIAM FAULKNER
"Beyond"
The moment you love, you lose your freedom, for the simple reason that you have to take others into account. You have to worry about them, empathise with them and feel some responsibility for them. Sociopaths are the only truly free people. That is why freedom is highly overrated.
TIM LOTT
"Love is ... a torment and a joy. And it's not for softies", The Guardian, July 22, 2016
Tim Lott (born 23 January 1956) is a novelist, travel journalist, and an occasional op-ed writer for the Independent on Sunday.
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
Love called, and I could not linger,
But sought the forbidden tryst,
As music follows the finger
Of the dreaming lutanist.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"Telepathy"
Love was a country he knew nothing about.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
To speak of love is to make love.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Love laughs at locksmiths.
ENGLISH PROVERB
Hatred stirs up dissension, but love covers over all wrongs.
BIBLE
Proverbs 10:12
Love, as the poet says, is like the spring. It grows on you and seduces you slowly and gently, but it holds tight like the roots of a tree. You don't know until you're ready to go that you can't move, that you would have to mutilate yourself in order to be free. That's the feeling. It doesn't last, at least it doesn't have to. But it holds on like a steel claw in your chest. Even if the tree dies, the roots cling to you. I've seen men and women give up everything for love that once was.
WALTER MOSLEY
The Man in My Basement
In the religion of Love the courtesan is a heretic; but the nun is an atheist.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
Love's very pain is sweet,
But its reward is in the world divine
Which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Epipsychidion