quotations about love
Love isn't like money--the more you give away the more you get back, and the more you have to give.
S. M. STIRLING
The Sunrise Lands
A man is only as good as what he loves.
SAUL BELLOW
Seize the Day
Love, unconquerable,
Waster of rich men, keeper
Of warm lights and all-night vigil
In the soft face of a girl:
Sea-wanderer, forest-visitor!
Even the pure immortals cannot escape you,
And mortal man, in his one day's dusk,
Trembles before your glory.
SOPHOCLES
Antigone
Love is a farthing piece, a bloody bribe pressed in the palm of God and thrown away.
STELLA BENSON
This Is the End
Love's a fire that needs renewal
Of fresh beauty for its fuel.
THOMAS CAMPBELL
Freedom and Love
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
THOMAS MANN
The Magic Mountain
Love is clockworks
And cold steel
Fingers too numb to feel
Squeeze the handle
Blow out the candle
Love is blindness
U2
"Love Is Blindness", Achtung Baby
All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Other Wind
Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929 - January 22, 2018) was an American author best known for her works of speculative fiction. Her literary career spanned nearly sixty years, yielding more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children's books.
Let me prevail as of old, as lover, as lord, as king, or have done with Love's tyrant rule.
WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT
To Nimue
Sure, love vincit omnia; is immeasurably above all ambition, more precious than wealth, more noble than name. He knows not life who knows not that: he hath not felt the highest faculty of the soul who hath not enjoyed it.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
What is the science at work behind falling out of love? How does the skin of a person you made love to once start feeling strange even to touch? How do feelings that you once invested your every living breath in while expressing just get reduced to mere memories of words? How does the joy of a heart overflowing with love suddenly transforms into an empty cauldron with echoes of pain? Is love a mirage?
AMIT MEHRA
"As I Watch a Love End I Realize, Love is Always a Stowaway", The Good Men Project, March 14, 2016
True love survives all shocks: an affection originally produced by admiration for unusual beauty may not only survive the loss of that beauty, but may become more intense if the beauty has changed into ugliness through causes that bind the lovers together in tender associations.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
Love is when you know you are right but you bite your tongue anyway. What greater love could you show for anyone than to swallow it, to deny yourself the supreme pleasure of proving that you are right by virtue of a long legalistic argument that proves your point? But sometimes you need to just leave it be. Let them be happy rather than you be right.
BRENDAN O'CONNOR
"Love is ...", The Independent, February 15, 2016
Looking back, I should have known better than to accompany Hugh to a love story. Such movies are always a danger, as unlike battling aliens or going undercover to track a serial killer, falling in love is something most adults have actually experienced at some point in their lives. The theme is universal and encourages the viewer to make a number of unhealthy comparisons, ultimately raising the question "Why can't our lives be like that?" It's a box best left unopened, and its avoidance explains the continued popularity of vampire epics and martial-arts extravaganzas.
DAVID SEDARIS
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
Love is ... seeing your bodies become desiccated trees as if battered by many winds.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016
No fruit has a more precise marked period of maturity, than love; if neglected to be gathered at that time, it will certainly fall to the ground and die away.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
Our earthly loves are but so many silver steps leading us up to the great golden love of God.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Powerbook
Love does not dominate; it cultivates.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
attributed, Words of Wisdom: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The clearer and happier you feel inside, the more joyous and loving your outer world becomes because love attracts love.
JUDY HALL
Love Crystals