quotations about love
All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Love
All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase--"I love you."
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
"The Offshore Pirate"
A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills: to know that high initiation, she must often tread where it is hard to tread, and feel the chill air, and watch through darkness. It is not true that love makes things easy: it makes us choose what is difficult.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
A summer romance is something special, because it blazes like a comet across the sky and then fades out. The thing that makes it special--that makes everything move so fast--is that a summer romance is doomed to end.
JOHN VORNHOLT
Coyote Moon
A man loves with more or less passion according to the number of cords which his pretty mistress binds to his heart.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
A history of listening to Top 40 radio had left me with a ridiculous and clichéd notion of love. I had never entertained the feeling myself but knew that it meant never having to say you're sorry. It was a many-splendored thing. Love was a rose and a hammer. Both blind and all-seeing, it made the world go round.
DAVID SEDARIS
Naked
Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?
WILLIAM FAULKNER
"Beyond"
When people fall in love they not only change themselves, but in their eyes the whole world changes. They may have been commonplace or dull before. But once in love they take on a strange brightness. And however uninteresting and dreary the world may have seemed to them, it at once becomes a fairyland.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Love", Reactions and Other Essays Discussing Those States of Feeling and Attitude of Mind That Find Expression In Our Individual Qualities
When love is full grown it has few words, and sometimes it growls them out.
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Old Gorgon Graham
When love enters, the whole spiritual constitution of a man changes, is filled with the Holy Ghost, and almost his form is altered.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Sons and Lovers
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".
What is annoying in love, is that it is a crime in which one cannot do without an accomplice.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
What a mystery is love! We cannot define it; we can only indicate it by describing the occasion on which it arises in the soul. If human love is inexplicable, Divine love is an ocean too deep for the plummet of man or archangel; too broad to be bounded by the thought of the loftiest intelligence in the universe. He who knows not in his inmost consciousness the love of God, will find this book sealed to his understanding. It can only be unlocked by the key of experience. Love is not a product of the reason. It is the free play of the spiritual sensibilities in the possession of its object. God is not only love, but he is love revealed. The perfect love of God toward man is designed to call forth perfect love toward God in man's bosom. Though the mirror on which that love is reflected is broken into uneven planes and reflects s distorted image--though the human soul at its best earthly estate under grace is shattered by infirmities and incurable imperfections--yet the love which man cherishes toward God may flow with all the united force of his being. The history of God's intercourse with men is the chronicle of his love. This is the only history which will outlive time itself, and escape the conflagration which will burn up the world and all the works therein. This will be our textbook forever. We can contemplate no more sublime and ennobling theme. The brightness of the material universe pales before the splendors of the Divine character--that central fire which kindles the souls of seraphs in heaven and melts the hearts of sinners on earth. Thus the science of the divine Heart infinitely above the science of the almighty Hand.
DANIEL STEELE
"Love Revealed", Love Enthroned
We can love a partner but not necessarily trust them. But when we trust a partner, loving them becomes much easier.
VIKKI ZIEGLER
"The Top 7 Reasons Why Marriages Last", Huffington Post, November 14, 2017
Wail not too wildly for expiring Love:
The Love that dies was never quite alive.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
Upon the roadway of my life,
A guide-board I will leave of love,
So those who follow in my steps
May guided be to hills above.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Love's Guide-Board"
Towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state -- admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological -- in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that "I" and "you" are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.
SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents
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
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"The Meeting in a Dream", Other Inquisitions
Thy love is like deep waters all around--
Warm pulsing waters, in whose brooding sound
The lone wail of my heart is lulled with dreams,
And the far clamour of the world is drowned.
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love
Though this faith in love as the one democratic, even universal, form of salvation open to us moderns is the result of a long religious history that saw divine love as the origin of human love and as the model to be imitated, it has paradoxically come into its own because of a decline in religious faith. It has been possible only because, since the end of the eighteenth century, love has increasingly filled the vacuum left by the retreat of Christianity.
SIMON MAY
Love: A History