quotations about love
Love can be a terrible curse. It can make you overlook even the largest flaws in a person's behavior.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
Brisingr
As love is the most noble and divine passion of the soul, so is it that to which we may justly attribute all the real satisfactions of life, and without it, man is unfinished, and unhappy.
APHRA BEHN
The Fair Jilt
Aphra Behn (1640 - 1689) was an English playwright, poet, and novelist from the Restoration era. As one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, she broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors.
True love is like a coin, changeless and pure,
Bright from the mint of virtuous affection,
Whose solid worth lies in its gold secure
Stamped with the soul's reflection;
Though Time may mar with rude and hasty hands
Its brilliancy and beauty,
Its gold unspoiled beneath the surface stands
Alloyed with common duty.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"Love's Counterfeits"
Only love makes fruitful the soul.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
Beyond
Love, the hidden spring of life, and soul's desire.
Celestial gold, secreted, laid by fire
In every heart, in every thing that lives,
In every thought that human impulse gives.
The coin of heaven, the treasure of the earth,
The rarest gift, and joy of largest worth.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"Love"
Edwin Leibfreed published several books of poetry, including A Garland of Verse (1910), A Soliloquy of Life (1915), and The Man of a Thousand Loves (1932).
Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing there trembling? Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is its beauty.... People with no imagination feed it with sex -- the clown of love. They don't know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that -- softly, without props.
TONI MORRISON
Love
You might as well make yourself fly as to make yourself love.
MARILYN MONROE
My Story
We can't profess love without talking through hand puppets.
DAVID SEDARIS
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
To follow the impulse of love and feeling is the secret law of every woman's heart.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.
SYLVIA PLATH
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
LOVE.--A sentiment we all entertain for ourselves, and occasionally imagine others entertain for us.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke
Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Songs of Experience
Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God.
TONI MORRISON
Paradise
It is difficult here to give definite examples, but everybody knows how, in the subtle psychology of Falling in Love, there are involved innumerable minor elements, physical and mental, which strike us exactly because of their absolute adaptation to form with ourselves an adequate union. Of course we do not definitely seek out and discover such qualities; instinct works far more intuitively than that; but we find at last, by subsequent observation, how true and how trustworthy were its immediate indications. That is to say, those men do so who were wise enough or fortunate enough to follow the earliest promptings of their own hearts, and not to be ashamed of that divinest and deepest of human intuitions, love at first sight.
GRANT ALLEN
"Falling in Love", Falling in Love and Other Essays
If you grew up in a house where you weren't loved, you didn't know there was an alternative.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
The Marriage Plot
He who is himself crossed in love is able from time to time to master his passion, for he is not the creature but the creator of his own misery; and if a lover is unable to control his passion, he at least knows that he is himself to blame for his sufferings. But he who is loved without reciprocating that love is lost beyond redemption, for it is not in his power to set a limit to that other's passion, to keep it within bounds, and the strongest will is reduced to impotence in the face of another's desire.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
All you need is love.
THE BEATLES
"All You Need Is Love", Magical Mystery Tour
The Beatles were an English rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960. Rooted in skiffle, beat, and 1950s rock and roll, their sound incorporated elements of classical music and traditional pop in previously unheard-of ways. The band later explored music styles ranging from ballads and Indian music to psychedelia and hard rock.
All passions make us commit some faults, love alone makes us ridiculous.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so how could we take it back without asking?
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Written on the Body
Lust is a sprightly servant,
Gallant where wines are poured;
Love is a bitter master,
Love is an iron lord.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT
Young Adventure