quotations about love
Love was a delicious blend of warm and cold. There was comfort in making love. It solved no problems: but one could run away from problems.
LARRY NIVEN
Ringworld
In the vacuum of the heart love falls forever.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit is Rich
Of all earthly music, that which reaches the farthest into heaven is the beating of a loving heart.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Prometheus Unbound
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
Heav'nly love shall outdo Hellish hate.
JOHN MILTON
Paradise Lost
Love isn't love until it's past.
PRINCE
"Sometimes It Snows in April", Parade
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"The Meeting in a Dream", Other Inquisitions
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
G. K. CHESTERTON
"The Advantages of Having One Leg", On Lying in Bed and Other Essays
One word
Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is love.
SOPHOCLES
Oedipus at Colonus
No one can genuinely love the world, which is too large to love entire. To love all the world at once is pretense or dangerous self-delusion. Loving the world is like loving the idea of love, which is perilous because, feeling virtuous about this grand affection, you are freed from the struggles and the duties that come with loving people as individuals.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Hours
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
"To fall for," "to be fallen for"--I feel in these words something unspeakably vulgar, farcical, and at the same time extraordinarily complacent. Once these expressions put in an appearance, no matter how solemn the place, the silent cathedrals of melancholy crumble, leaving nothing but an impression of fatuousness. It is curious, but the cathedrals of melancholy are not necessarily demolished if one can replace the vulgar "What a messy business it is to be fallen for" by the more literary "What uneasiness lies in being loved."
OSAMU DAZAI
No Longer Human
Love demands that we stop asking "how can my wife/parent/sibling be better" and start asking "how can I make my wife/parent/sibling the happiest in the world?" Love demands death to self.
CHRIS STEFANICK
"Love is Easy Until It's Tested", National Catholic Register, March 19, 2016
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
Strangelove
Strange highs and strange lows
Strangelove
That's how my love goes
Strangelove
Will you give it to me
Will you take the pain
I will give to you
Again and again
And will you return it
DEPECHE MODE
"Strangelove", Music for the Masses
Swift doth young Love flee,
And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream.
GEORGE MEREDITH
Modern Love
Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
When [men] see a pretty woman, and feel the delicious madness of love coming over them, they always stop to calculate her temper, her money, their own money, or suitableness for the married life.... Ha, ha, ha! Let us fool in this way no more. I have been in love forty-three times with all ranks and conditions of women, and would have married every time if they would have let me. How many wives had King Solomon, the wisest of men? And is not that story a warning to us that Love is master of the wisest? It is only fools who defy him.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Men's Wives
A capacity for hating the object of desire is, perhaps, the best cure for love in cases of disappointment.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections