quotations about love
The highest evidence that love exists is its readiness to overlook and pardon faults.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
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
If Love his moment overstay,
Hatred's swift repulsions play.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Visit
Oh, my young friends, how delightful is the beginning of a love-business, and how undignified, sometimes, the end!
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The Virginians
Love is all around you and all you have to do is claim it.
PATRICIA LOVE
The Truth About Love
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
Love made you vulnerable; if you gave your heart to another, they could leave you or die.
JOHN TWELVE HAWKS
The Traveler
That feelings of love and hate make rational judgments impossible in public affairs, as in private affairs, we can clearly enough see in others, though not so clearly in ourselves.
HERBERT SPENCER
The Study of Sociology
No friend to Love like a long voyage at sea.
APHRA BEHN
The Rover
Aphra Behn (1640 - 1689) was an English playwright, poet, and novelist from the Restoration era. As one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, she broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors.
Love does not seek equals; it creates them.
STENDAHL
The Red and the Black
Love is but a fire that is to be transmitted.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Psychoanalysis of Fire
Oh, ill betide that villain love, not love,
That all its object and affection finds
In the mere contact of encircling arms!
PEDRO CALDERON DE LA BARCA
The Painter of His Own Dishonour
No man knoweth how another man maketh his love, for women tell not.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
I am convinced the most unfortunate people are those who would make an art of love. It sours other effort. Of all artists, they are certainly the most wretched.
NORMAN MAILER
The Man Who Studied Yoga
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
Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
The Looking Glass War
To love is for the Soul to choose a companion, and travel with it along the perilous defiles and winding ways of life; mutually sustaining, when it is rugged with obstructions, and mutually rejoicing, when rich broad plains and sunny slopes make journeying delight.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
The Lives and Works of Goethe
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
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
Love is ... letting them flirt with the person next door, because you understand they need to feel like anything is possible.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016