quotations about love
Love born of anxiety resembles a thorn shaped so that efforts to pull it out of one's flesh merely cause it to penetrate more deeply therein.
ANDRE MAUROIS
An Art of Living
In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook
Love is the most destructive weapon of all, the only problem being how to contain and channel it into something that can be spanned, aimed and loosed.
K. J. PARKER
Devices and Desires
Love is an experiment ... what happens next is always surprising.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
I don't love you any less, but I can't love you anymore.
LYLE LOVETT
"I Can't Love You Anymore", The Road to Ensenada
I'd go hungry, I'd go black and blue
I'd go crawling down the avenue
There's nothing that I wouldn't do
To make you feel my love
BOB DYLAN
"Make You Feel My Love", Time Out of Mind
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
ANAIS NIN
attributed, French Writers of the Past
Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903 - January 14, 1977) was a French-Cuban American diarist, essayist, novelist and writer of short stories and erotica. Nin's most studied works are her diaries or journals, which detail her marriages to Hugh Parker Guiler and Rupert Pole, in addition to her numerous affairs, including those with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and writer Henry Miller.
If love lives through all life; and survives through all sorrow; and remains steadfast with us through all changes; and in all darkness of spirit burns brightly; and, if we die, deplores us for ever, and loves still equally; and exists with the very last gasp and throb of the faithful bosom--whence it passes with the pure soul, beyond death; surely it shall be immortal!
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Newcomes
When it comes to attracting men, logic escapes even the savviest of women. Probably because there is no logic involved.... You can read all the self-help books you want, you can run on a treadmill till you've reduced your tuchas to bubkes, you can stuff your face with oysters, and it won't make a bit of difference. For love, attraction, compatibility, and companionship are not a science of objectivity; they are, rather, far and away the single most subjective matter in the history of the universe. Did Cavewoman X have a romp in the cave with Caveman Y because of his universally sought-after ability to single-handedly kill a wildebeest with his bare hands and bring it to the feet of his intended? No, she probably just liked the way his mouth turned up at the corners in concentration while he chiseled out a piece of flint.
GWEN MACSAI
Lipshtick
Great Love has many attributes, and shrines
For varied worshippers, but his force divine
Shows most its many-named fulness in the man
Whose nature multitudinously mixed--
Each ardent impulse grappling with a thought--
Resists all easy gladness, all content
Save mystic rapture, where the questioning soul
Flooded with consciousness of good that is
Finds life one bounteous answer.
GEORGE ELIOT
The Spanish Gypsy
I've never had my heart broken ... It's a very sad state of affairs. I think everybody should have their heart broken. I don't think it says anything good about me at all ... My lover and my best friend and my partner has been my work. But I certainly would in life have wanted to know--would like to know--what it was like to have a real partner.
SALLY FIELD
Good Housekeeping, Mar. 2009
Love makes the world less worldly, less dense, more transparent to the divine dimension, the light of consciousness itself.
ECKHART TOLLE
A New Earth
To show great love for God and our neighbor we need not do great things. It is how much love we put in the doing that makes our offering Something Beautiful for God.
MOTHER TERESA
A Gift for God
Love is an anesthesia. It puts you to sleep, it allows you to overlook, not question, not care ... and then, one day, you come to. And, by God and all his horny angels ... it's an eye opener.
ANN WUEHLER
The Next Mrs. Jacob Anderson
When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate.
JOHN BERGER
Ways of Seeing
And love is part and union in itself
Of all that is in nature, brilliant, pure--
Of all in feeling, sacred and sublime.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Festus
Is it the beloved who evokes love, or the lover who has love to give?
DOUGLAS CARLTON ABRAMS
The Lost Diary of Don Juan
The capacity to love is the fruit of age, not the monopoly of youth.
SIMON MAY
Love: A History
Love is not wanting the other to become a clone of ourselves. 'Other' offers resistance, pushing us to find what is self. Love is actively embracing our equality and pushing each other to realise our full potential and make our full contribution to the world.
HOWARD JONES
"What is love -- can it really be defined and explained?", The Guardian, February 12, 2016
Love is the enchanted dawn of every heart.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
Méditations Poétiques