quotations about love
A blaze of love, and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.
THOMAS HARDY
The Return of the Native
Before I met my husband, I'd never fallen in love. I'd stepped in it a few times.
RITA RUDNER
stand-up routine
Free-market free love is simultaneously a utopian idea and a dystopian idea. The idea of total sexual freedom is an ideal, but then it's also a Michel Houellebecq nightmare. Now online dating and apps have made that normal. Everyone is "on the market" or "off the market"; friends with "benefits," "investing" time--these are all economic metaphors.
MOIRA WEIGEL
"Love in a Time of Capital: An Interview With Moira Weigel", The Nation, August 29, 2016
If somebody says "I love you" to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? "I love you, too."
KURT VONNEGUT
Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons
Love is a cognitive, willful act. Feelings have very little to do with it, particularly around three o'clock in the morning when the baby needs changing or somebody has "lost it" before getting to the bathroom to throw up.
KEVIN LEMAN
Smart Women Know When to Say No
When a plain-looking woman is loved, it is certain to be very passionately; for either her influence on her lover is irresistible, or she has some secret and more irresistible charms than those of beauty.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Affections", Les Caractères
Jean de La Bruyère (16 August 1645 - 11 May 1696) was a French philosopher and moralist noted for his satire. His Caractères, which appeared in 1688, captures the psychological, social, and moral profile of French society of his time.
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Human Condition
Love is to the soul of him who loves, what the soul is to the body which it animates.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful molder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State- and Church-begotten weed, marriage?
EMMA GOLDMAN
Anarchism and Other Essays
Love kills.
EDNA BUCHANAN
Love Kills
O, human love! thou spirit given,
On Earth, of all we hope in Heaven!
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"Tamerlane"
Love is a two-way street constantly under construction.
CARROLL BRYANT
blog post, September 19, 2012
Love is one of the last things that gives meaning and magic in a world where god is dead and nothing matters anymore.
BRENDAN O'CONNOR
"Love is ...", The Independent, February 15, 2016
To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
Graziella: A Story of Italian Love
Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that hapiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lovers's eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favourite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
Other Voices, Other Rooms
Trust Love, nor fear to soar upon his track.
The wings that bore to Heaven will bear thee back.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
Our love is a harsh cord
that binds us wounding us
and if we want
to leave our wound,
to separate,
it makes a new knot for us and condemns us
to drain our blood and burn together.
PABLO NERUDA
"The Furies"
Ah, love, 'tis a sorrowful land!
KENNETH RAND
"The Old Lovers"
We outgrow love like other things
And put it in the drawer,
Till it an antique fashion shows
Like costumes grandsires wore.
EMILY DICKINSON
"We Outgrow Love Like Other Things"
I've read more than a hundred books
Seeing love mentioned many thousand times
But despite all the places I've looked
It's still no clearer
I'm still no nearer
The meaning of love
DEPECHE MODE
"The Meaning of Love", A Broken Frame