quotations about love
Some meet love's dreams when kissed by death,
And some again in youth,
But all have felt the quickening breath
Of love's undying truth.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"Love's Dreams"
Edwin Leibfreed published several books of poetry, including A Garland of Verse (1910), A Soliloquy of Life (1915), and The Man of a Thousand Loves (1932).
True love begins in heaven's bower,
Unfolds on earth a perfect flower.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Love's Language"
Love, which, in concert with Abstinence, established Faith, and which, along with Patience, builds up Chastity, is like the columns that sustain the four corners of a house. For it was that same Love which planted a glorious garden redolent with precious herbs and noble flowers--roses and lilies--which breathed forth a wondrous fragrance, that garden on which the true Solomon was accustomed to feast his eyes.
HILDEGARD OF BINGEN
letter to the Monk Guibert, 1176
But love, like wine, gives a tumultuous bliss,
Heighten'd indeed beyond all mortal pleasures;
But mingles pangs and madness in the bowl.
EDWARD YOUNG
The Revenge
If a man can be properly said to love something, it must be clear that he feels affection for it as a whole, and does not love part of it to the exclusion of the rest.
PLATO
The Republic
Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
ANNE CARSON
The Beauty of the Husband
A summer breeze can be very refreshing; but if we try to put it in a tin can so we can have it entirely to ourselves, the breeze will die. Our beloved is the same. He is like a breeze, a cloud, a flower. If you imprison him in a tin can, he will die. Yet many people do just that. They rob their loved one of his liberty, until he can no longer be himself. They live to satisfy themselves and use their loved one to help them fulfill that. That is not loving; it is destroying.
THICH NHAT HANH
Teachings on Love
True love always brings joy to ourselves and to the one we love. If our love does not bring joy to both of us, it is not true love.
THICH NHAT HANH
Teachings on Love
Among all methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as this gust of feverish agitation that sweeps over us from time to time. For then the die is cast, the person whose company we enjoy at that moment is the person we shall henceforward love. It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when -- in this moment of deprivation -- the quest is for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage -- the insensate, agonizing need to possess exclusively.
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
Please do not think for a second, as some people do, that Love is primarily an affair of the emotions. It is not: it never ought to be. It is an affair of the will: it is an act of choice.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
Spiritual Letters of Monsignor R. Hugh Benson to One of His Converts
We all crave love. Its universal language unites us as humans. Yet, it also slays us. If you gave people a choice between heartbreak and the Zika virus, we'd all be feverish in bed. Love's pain spreads across our flesh faster than any plague. As soon as you think you're cured, you relapse.
HEIDI K. ISERN
"The responsibility to fall out of love is on you", Quartz, August 5, 2016
As the gambler said of his dice, to love and win is the best thing, to love and lose is the next best.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERY
Pendennis
If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?
LILY TOMLIN
attributed, Parted Lips: Lesbian Love Quotes Through the Ages
To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.
WOODY ALLEN
Love and Death
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Letters to a Young Poet
Love is the garden of the young.
HERBERT KRETZMER
"A Heart Full of Love (Reprise)", Les Miserables
The utopia of love is completion to the point of stillness. The ideal act of love is to contain all.
JOHN BERGER
Keeping a Rendezvous
Love never goes away; it just changes form.
PAMELA ANDERSON
Esquire, Jan. 2005
Love is the one thing that can really sure-enough lighten all of life's dark clouds.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Elmer Gantry
Among the blessings of love there is hardly one more exquisite than the sense that in uniting the beloved life to ours we can watch over its happiness, bring comfort where hardship was, and over memories of privation and suffering open the sweetest fountains of joy.
GEORGE ELIOT
Daniel Deronda