LOVE QUOTES XXXIV

quotations about 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


Love ... must come suddenly, with great thunderclaps and bolts of lightning -- a hurricane from heaven that drops down on your life, overturns it, tears away your will like a leaf, and carries your whole heart off with it into the abyss.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Madame Bovary

Tags: Gustave Flaubert


Didn't love, like a plant from India, require a prepared soil, a particular temperature? Sighs in the moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over hands yielded to a lover, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness thus could not be separated from the balconies of great châteaux filled with idle amusements, a boudoir with silk blinds, a good thick carpet, full of pots of flowers, and a bed raised on a dais, nor from the sparkle of precious stones and shoulder knots on servants' livery.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Madame Bovary


It was always about love. Always, always about love. Lost love, love denied, the obsessive hunger for love. Parental or romantic. Whether it was twisted or pure, fulfilled or unrequited, love was always at the source.

JAMES W. HALL

Magic City

Tags: James W. Hall


Love can flourish only as long as it is free and spontaneous; it tends to be killed by the thought of duty. To say that it is your duty to love so-and-so is the surest way to cause you to hate him of her.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

Marriage and Morals

Tags: Bertrand Russell


Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Minima Moralia


Swift doth young Love flee,
And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream.

GEORGE MEREDITH

Modern Love

Tags: George Meredith


Strangelove
Strange highs and strange lows
Strangelove
That's how my love goes
Strangelove
Will you give it to me
Will you take the pain
I will give to you
Again and again
And will you return it

DEPECHE MODE

"Strangelove", Music for the Masses


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

Tags: David Sedaris


Love demands that we stop asking "how can my wife/parent/sibling be better" and start asking "how can I make my wife/parent/sibling the happiest in the world?" Love demands death to self.

CHRIS STEFANICK

"Love is Easy Until It's Tested", National Catholic Register, March 19, 2016


When people love each other, when they find each other out of thousands and millions of people. It's always destiny.

SERGEI LUKYANENKO

Night Watch

Tags: Sergei Lukyanenko


Perhaps love's greatest gift--that it is indeed unconditional--is also its greatest curse.

KRISTIN ARMSTRONG

O Magazine, Feb. 2007

Tags: Kristin Armstrong


Of all fires
love is the only inexhaustible one.

PABLO NERUDA

O Magazine, Feb. 2007


The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

G. K. CHESTERTON

"The Advantages of Having One Leg", On Lying in Bed and Other Essays


To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

JORGE LUIS BORGES

"The Meeting in a Dream", Other Inquisitions

Tags: Jorge Luis Borges


Love is love's reward.

JOHN DRYDEN

Palamon and Arcite

Tags: John Dryden


Love is the only shocking act left on the face of the earth.

SANDRA BERNHARD

attributed, Parted Lips: Lesbian Love Quotes Through the Ages

Tags: Sandra Bernhard


Love is a very difficult -- occupation. You got to work at it, man. It ain't a thing every Tom, Dick and Harry has got a true aptitude for.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

Period of Adjustment


Love--what a volume in a word, an ocean in a tear,
A seventh heaven in a glance, a whirlwind in a sigh,
The lightning in a touch, a millennium in a moment,
What concentrated joy or woe in blest or blighted love!
For it is that native poetry springing up indigenous to Mind,
The heart's own-country music thrilling all its chords,
The story without an end that angels throng to hear,
The word, the king of words, carved on Jehovah's heart!

MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER

Proverbial Philosophy

Tags: Martin Farquhar Tupper


Of all earthly music, that which reaches the farthest into heaven is the beating of a loving heart.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit