quotations about love
Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
The Days Before
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
In love, we are best pleased when we please others.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
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
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"
Why is the measure of love loss?
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Written on the Body
Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Passion
For me the cosmic aeons lie complete,
O Love, between thy forehead and thy feet!
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love
The ultimate fact of the universe is love; and its sway is all-comprehensive, and absolutely certain of final victory.
FRANK CUMMINS LOCKWOOD
Robert Browning
Love is many things and sometimes we are never really sure if it even exists, but all I know is that if you were to show me her soul in a photograph, I wouldn't even ask to see the others.
CHRISTOPHER POINDEXTER
Remington Typewriter Poetry
Love is love's reward.
JOHN DRYDEN
Palamon and Arcite
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
Love is a boomerang that returns to the thrower's hand.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Love also looks like me coming downstairs to a full pot of coffee every morning because coffee is love. Love looks like all the lunches being made already so I can enjoy that aforementioned cup of coffee.
AMY BETTERS-MIDTVEDT
"Wife Writes Note About What Love Is Like When Instagram Isn't Looking", Huffington Post, November 1, 2017
Thou demandest what is love? It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"On Love", Essays and Letters
A pair of bright eyes with a dozen glances suffice to subdue a man; to enslave him, and enflame him; to make him even forget; they dazzle him so that the past becomes straightway dim to him; and he so prizes them that he would give all his life to possess 'em.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
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 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"
Love is the most common miracle.
JOHN GREEN
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
God has set his intentions in the flowers, in the dawn, in the spring--it is his will that we should love.
VICTOR HUGO
Toilers of the Sea
Victor Marie Hugo (1802-1885) is considered the most important of the French Romantic writers. Though regarded in France as one of that country's greatest poets, he is better known abroad for such novels as Les Misérables (1862) and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831).