quotations about love
Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king.
EMMA GOLDMAN
"Marriage and Love", Anarchism and Other Essays
The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open.
PHILIP ROTH
The Dying Animal
This may be the very nature of love, a passion as fickle as the sea, full of certainty when the object of desire is absent, yet dubious when confronted again with the lover's presence.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
Love is in that extra hour of sleep you didn't even realize he gave you until you woke up feeling that little bit more human.
RASHA RUSHDY
"Love Is Sweatpants and Take-out, Actually", Huffington Post, February 14, 2016
When people fall in love they not only change themselves, but in their eyes the whole world changes. They may have been commonplace or dull before. But once in love they take on a strange brightness. And however uninteresting and dreary the world may have seemed to them, it at once becomes a fairyland.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Love", Reactions and Other Essays Discussing Those States of Feeling and Attitude of Mind That Find Expression In Our Individual Qualities
Love is a flaming heart, and its flames aspire
Till they cloud the soul in the smoke of a windy fire.
ARTHUR SYMONS
"In the Wood of Finvara"
He gives a ripe apple for an apple-blossom that changes an old love for a new.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Why is the measure of love loss?
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Written on the Body
Towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state -- admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological -- in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that "I" and "you" are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.
SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents
Love is like infinity: You can't have more or less infinity, and you can't compare two things to see if they're "equally infinite." Infinity just is, and that's the way I think love is, too.
FRED ROGERS
The World According to Mister Rogers
There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment.
SARAH DESSEN
The Truth About Forever
Experience is bitter, but its teachings we retain; It has taught me this--who once has loved, loves never on earth again!
GEORGE ARNOLD
"Introspection"
We love instinctively, but we love well because we've learned how.
BOB LONSBERRY
A Various Language
Love is when you come back from the supermarket having rung ten times to check what is needed and you arrive in and take off your wet coat and there's no milk and you go back out.
BRENDAN O'CONNOR
"Love is ...", The Independent, February 15, 2016
I sought for love on the highway,
For love unselfish and pure,
And found it in good deeds blooming,
Tho' often in haunts obscure.
HENRY ABBEY
"Trailing Arbutus"
Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Invisible Monsters
God is Love, I dare say. But what a mischievous devil Love is.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Note Books
Love is enough: though the World be a-waning,
And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining,
Though the sky be too dark for dim eyes to discover
The gold-cups and daisies fair blooming thereunder,
Though the hills be held shadows, and the sea a dark wonder
And this day draw a veil over all deeds pass'd over,
Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter;
The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter
These lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover.
WILLIAM MORRIS
"Love Is Enough"
We look at the one little woman's face we love, as we look at the face of our mother earth, and see all sorts of answers to our own yearnings.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase--"I love you."
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
"The Offshore Pirate"