quotations about love
If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another's; if we feel, we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood. This is Love.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"On Love", Essays and Letters
If you listen to neurologists and psychiatrists, you'd never fall in love.
TIMOTHY LEARY
Changing My Mind, Among Others
With the secularization of the Western world, we are turning to romantic love to give us what we once looked for in the realm of the divine. Transcendence, meaning, wholeness, and ecstasy.
ESTHER PEREL
"A top couples' therapist says our 'religion of romantic love' is making relationships harder", Business Insider, November 10, 2017
To a person in love, the value of the individual is intuitively known. Love needs no logic for its mission. It roots in a bare wisdom that exists in senses more than mind, a wisdom that, in primitive form, evolved the mind which so often overlooks it.
CHARLES LINDBERGH
Autobiography of Values
Love fades, the dreamer wakes, the dream is brief.
MAURICE BROWNE
"At Dawn"
I love Love -- though he has wings,
And like light can flee.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"Rarely, Rarely, Comest Thou"
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
attributed, Zen Soup: Tasty Morsels of Wisdom from Great Minds
To love is for the Soul to choose a companion, and travel with it along the perilous defiles and winding ways of life; mutually sustaining, when it is rugged with obstructions, and mutually rejoicing, when rich broad plains and sunny slopes make journeying delight.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
The Lives and Works of Goethe
Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all that there is in life, it seems to me. But I grant you, if you deny the VARIETY of love you deny love altogether. If you try to specialize love into one set of accepted feelings, you wound the very soul of love. Love MUST be multiform, else it is just tyranny, just death.
D. H. LAWRENCE
The Ladybird
David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 - 2 March 1930) was an English writer and poet. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection on the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization. His opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage".
No form of love is wrong, so long as it is love.
D. H. LAWRENCE
The Ladybird
David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 - 2 March 1930) was an English writer and poet. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection on the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization. His opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage".
The stage is more beholding to love, than the life of man; for as to the stage, love is even matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief; sometimes like a siren, sometimes like a fury.
JOHN LOCKE
"Of Love", The Conduct of the Understanding: Essays, Moral, Economical, and Political
Love defies all calculation. We are not judicious in love; we do not select those whom we ought to love, but those whom we cannot help loving.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
attributed, Proust Was a Neuroscientist
Love's tongue is in the eyes.
PHINEAS FLETCHER
Piscatory Eclogues
I'll tell you ... what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter -- as I did!
CHARLES DICKENS
Great Expectations
Love's wing moults when caged and captured,
Only free, he soars enraptured.
THOMAS CAMPBELL
Freedom and Love
There is in man's nature a secret inclination and motion towards love of others, which, if it be not spent upon some one or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many, and maketh men become humane and charitable, as it is seen sometimes in friars. Nuptial love maketh mankind, friendly love perfecteth it, but wanton love corrupteth and embaseth it.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
Who does not know of eyes, lighted by love once, where the flame shines no more?--of lamps extinguished, once properly trimmed and tended? Every man has such in his house. Such momentoes make our splendidest chambers look blank and sad; such faces seen in a day cast a gloom upon our sunshine. So oaths mutually sworn, and invocations of heaven, and priestly ceremonies, and fond belief, and love, so fond and faithful that it never doubted but that it should live for ever, are all of no avail towards making love eternal: it dies, in spite of the banns and the priest; and I have often thought there should be a visitation of the sick for it, and a funeral service, and an extreme unction, and an abi in pace. It has its course, like all mortal things--its beginning, progress, and decay. It buds and it blooms out into sunshine, and it withers and ends.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
Becoming addicted to love isn't uncommon. The chemicals released during that first phase are the same or similar to those released when consuming cocaine or drinking alcohol. And for some people the desire to feel that way all the time can be hard to resist.
KURT SMITH
"Yes, it is Possible to Be Addicted to Love", beliefnet, August 8, 2018
If a thing loves, it is infinite.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Annotations to Swedenborg
The affections are like lightning: you cannot tell where they will strike till they have fallen.
HENRI-DOMINIQUE LACORDAIRE
attributed, A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern