quotations about love
You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Painted Drum
Why the pull of sexual attraction to someone who is unfamiliar, whose allure as Horace marked, portends a war with one's self? As we'll consider, the object of sexual desire has a different constitution from the focus of personal love. With sexual love, there is an emphasis upon touch and kinesthesia that alters the whole/part structure of objects. It brings with it a shift in temporality as well as makes the pleasure of repetitive sexual scenarios curiously new and unique.
PETER HADREAS
A Phenomenology of Love and Hate
When there is love in the heart, there are rainbows in the eyes, which cover every black cloud with gorgeous hues.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
When love comes to town I'm gonna jump that train
When love comes to town I'm gonna catch that flame.
Maybe I was wrong to ever let you down
But I did what I did before love came to town.
U2
"When Love Comes to Town", Rattle and Hum
What love is depends on where you are in relation to it. Secure in it, it can feel as mundane and necessary as air -- you exist within it, almost unnoticing. Deprived of it, it can feel like an obsession; all-consuming, a physical pain. Love is the driver for all great stories: not just romantic love, but the love of parent for child, for family, for country. It is the point before consummation of it that fascinates: what separates you from love, the obstacles that stand in its way. It is usually at those points that love is everything.
JOJO MOYES
"What is love -- can it really be defined and explained?", The Guardian, February 12, 2016
What is love? The need of coming out of one's self.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
What could be more serious than the love of man for woman, what more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers, these people entering into illusion glittering eyed, must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept--our own selves--that we love.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
We must rejoice when love is great, and pardon its excess, for love is the staff of life, and life without love is life in vain.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
Until Obi met Clara on board the cargo boat Sasa he had thought of love as another grossly over-rated European invention.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
The kind of love my mum talks about is full of worry and work and forgiving people and putting up with things and stuff like that. It's not a lot of fun, that's for sure. If that really is love, the kind my mum talks about, then nobody can ever know if they love somebody, can they? It seems like what she's saying is, if you're pretty sure you love somebody, the way I was sure in those few weeks, then you can't love them, because that isn't what love is. Trying to understand what she means by love would do your head in.
NICK HORNBY
Slam
Oh! For love, for the painfully nourished, tenderly cherished, sweet frenzies illusion, the known-illusion within the globule of sentimental cynicism. For romantic love, then, I sacrifice honor, decency, human kindness, charity, honesty, friendship and the future -- all, (ah!) for love!
EDWARD ABBEY
The Serpents of Paradise
Love released from bond, and unburdened of its fetters, is love no longer.
THOMAS BURKE
A Love Lesson
Love must be the same in all worlds.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.
C. S. LEWIS
The Problem of Pain
Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.
FRED ROGERS
The World According to Mister Rogers
Love is what you've been through with somebody.
JAMES THURBER
Life Magazine, Mar. 14, 1960
Love is the desire to give, not to receive, something. Love is the art of producing something with the other's talents.
BERTOLT BRECHT
"Love of Whom?"
Love is the centre and circumference;
The cause and aim of all things--'tis the key
To joy and sorrow, and the recompense
For all the ills that have been, or may be.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"What Love Is"