quotations about love
To men of a certain type
The suspicion that they are incapable of loving
Is as disturbing to their self-esteem
As, in cruder men, the fear of impotence.
T. S. ELIOT
The Cocktail Party
Love is intangible and invisible. If you want to reduce it to materialism, it is a biologically adaptive impulse to ensure the survival of your genes. But nothing makes nonsense of scientific materialism more comprehensively than the mystery of love. All the truly real things are not measurable.
TIM LOTT
"Love is ... a torment and a joy. And it's not for softies", The Guardian, July 22, 2016
Tim Lott (born 23 January 1956) is a novelist, travel journalist, and an occasional op-ed writer for the Independent on Sunday.
The girlish talk of love and lovers is henceforth stale and commonplace. The cheap jokes of the comic papers on love and its poor counterfeit, flirtation, are a blasphemy. Love-romances and love-poems have lost their charm, so inadequate are they to tell love's true story. She is herself the romance; she is herself the poem.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
Let us suppose the loved one is as madly impelled toward the lover. In a few days, in an hour, nay, in an instant -- for there is such a thing as love at first sight -- this man and woman, two unrelated individuals, who may never have seen each other before, conceive a passion, greater, intenser than all other affections, friendships, and social relations. So great, so intense is it, that the world could crumble to star-dust so long as their souls rushed together. If necessary, they would break all ties, forsake all friends, abandon all blood kin, run away from all moral responsibilities. There can be no discussion.... We see it every day, for love is the most perfectly selfish thing in the universe.
JACK LONDON
The Kempton-Wace Letters
Is it the beloved who evokes love, or the lover who has love to give?
DOUGLAS CARLTON ABRAMS
The Lost Diary of Don Juan
I really thought that love would save us all.
JOHN LENNON
attributed, The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 10, 1980
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.
The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
It must be sad to outlive aught we love.
GEORGE ELIOT
The Spanish Gypsy
If you want to fall in love, you can't hold everything in. You have to open up, take that risk. You'll be hurt sometimes, but if you don't, you'll never be happy. The one you find may not be the kind of woman you expected to fall in love with, but it wont matter, you'll love her for exactly what she is.
JEAN M. AUEL
The Valley of Horses
Love is not like the echo, which returneth only what is given; but, rather, like the pump, which returneth by the pail what it received by the pint.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
People who are having a love-sex relationship are continuously lying to each other because the very nature of the relationship demands that they do, because you have to make a love object of this person, which means that you editorialize about them. You know? You cut out what you don't want to see, you add this if it isn't there. And so therefore you're building a lie.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
Truman Capote: Conversations
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Written on the Body
Love is made out of ecstasy and wonder;
Love is a poignant and accustomed pain.
It is a burst of Heaven-shaking thunder;
It is a linnet's fluting after rain.
JOYCE KILMER
"In Memory"
Ah! let us love, my Love, for Time is heartless,
Be happy while you may!
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"The Lake"
He who loveth, knoweth the inner sun; he see'th Life's blaze.
ELISE PUMPELLY CABOT
"Arizona"
I loved a being, an idea of my own mind, which had no real existence. I concreted this abstract of perfection, I annexed this fictitious quality to the idea presented by a name; the being, whom that name signified, was by no means worthy of this. This is the truth: Unless I am determinedly blind -- unless I am resolved causelessly and selfishly to seek destruction, I must see it. Plain! is it not plain? I loved a being; the being, whom I loved, is not what she was; consequently, as love appertains to mind, and not body, she exists no longer. I regret when I find that she never existed, but in my mind; yet does it not border on willful deception, deliberate, intentional self-deceit, to continue to love the body, when the soul is no more?
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Jun. 2, 1811
Every genuine expression of love grows out of a consistent and total surrender to God.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Christmas sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, 1957
He who would not be idle, let him fall in love.
ROMAN PROVERB
Love for those too easily won does not last long.
ROMAN PROVERB