quotations about love
We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.
MAYA ANGELOU
A Brave and Startling Truth
Love's dream, too, knows decay;
Awhile the soul-harp's wildly thrilling strain
Pours out those notes we ne'er forget again,
And the deep fountains of the heart burst forth
As if to gladden every spot of earth;
But O! it will not stay.
MARY T. LATHRAP
"Song of the Earth-Weary"
Love's language everywhere is known.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Love's Language"
Love rays us round as glory swathes a star,
And, from the mystic touch of lips and palms,
Streams rosy warmth!
GERALD MASSEY
"To My Wife"
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?"
A little while the rose,
And after that the thorn;
An hour of dewy morn,
And then the glamour goes.
Ah, love in beauty born,
A little while the rose!
HENRY VAN DYKE
"Roseleaf"
It's easy to live when you're in love.
LEO ROBIN
"Easy Living"
Love for those too easily won does not last long.
ROMAN PROVERB
Love and faith are seen in works.
GERMAN PROVERB
Love makes the world go round.
FRENCH PROVERB
Love is like dew that falls on both nettles and lilies.
SWEDISH PROVERB
Love lives in palaces as well as in thatched huts.
JAPANESE PROVERB
Love does not dominate; it cultivates.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
attributed, Words of Wisdom: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
This love of ours, in so far as it is a love for one particular creature, is not perhaps a very real thing, since, though associations of pleasant or painful musings can attach it for a time to a woman to the extent of making us believe that it has been inspired by her in a logically necessary way, if on the other hand we detach ourselves deliberately or unconsciously from those associations, this love, as though it were in fact spontaneous and sprang from ourselves alone, will revive in order to bestow itself on another woman.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
Love is an amazing magnet.
NICHOLSON BAKER
Traveling Sprinkler
From the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreathes heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this--love; while the women ... would all the time be feeling, this is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
Love is a farthing piece, a bloody bribe pressed in the palm of God and thrown away.
STELLA BENSON
This Is the End
Love is always right.
RICHARD LAYMON
The Stake
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
Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Plague of Doves