quotations about love
Near even a candle, the visible heat.
So it is with a person in love.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"The Visible Heat"
It's easier to avoid the snares of love than to escape once you are in that net.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
Sometimes it seems ... as though only intelligent people are stupid enough to fall in love & only stupid people are intelligent enough to let themselves be loved.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
One Art: Letters
All passions make us commit some faults, love alone makes us ridiculous.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
It's logical that everyone wants to be in love. Then, for a while, life isn't taken up with the tedium of thinking everything through, talking things through. It's nice to be able to notice small objects or small moments, to point them out and to have someone eager to pretend that there's more to them than it seems.
ANN BEATTIE
"Moving Water", The New Yorker Stories
Not all men are worthy of love.
SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents
Love is the key to felicity, nor is there a heaven to any who love not. We enter Paradise through its gates only.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
Love does nothing but make you weak! It turns you into an object of pity and derision--a mewling pathetic creature no more fit to live than a worm squirming on the pavement after a hard summer rain.
TERESA MEDEIROS
The Vampire Who Loved Me
True love begins in heaven's bower,
Unfolds on earth a perfect flower.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Love's Language"
We've got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant.... You've got to keep watering it. You've got to really look after it and nurture it.
JOHN LENNON
ATV interview, Dec. 2, 1969
Love is as bitter as the dregs of sin,
As sweet as clover-honey in its cell;
Love is the password whereby souls get in
To Heaven--the gate that leads, sometimes, to Hell.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"What Love Is"
The utopia of love is completion to the point of stillness. The ideal act of love is to contain all.
JOHN BERGER
Keeping a Rendezvous
Giving and receiving love is vital to human existence. It is the glue that binds couples, families, communities, cultures, and nations.
FRANK LAWLIS
Mending the Broken Bond
We all crave love. Its universal language unites us as humans. Yet, it also slays us. If you gave people a choice between heartbreak and the Zika virus, we'd all be feverish in bed. Love's pain spreads across our flesh faster than any plague. As soon as you think you're cured, you relapse.
HEIDI K. ISERN
"The responsibility to fall out of love is on you", Quartz, August 5, 2016
Love isn't something we can just turn off like a well-oiled faucet. It drips, keeping us up at night.
HEIDI K. ISERN
"The responsibility to fall out of love is on you", Quartz, August 5, 2016
When two people meet and fall in love, there's a sudden rush of magic. Magic is just naturally present then. We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more. One day we wake up and find that the magic is gone. We hustle to get it back, but by then it's usually too late, we've used it up. What we have to do is work like hell at making additional magic right from the start. It's hard work, but if we can remember to do it, we greatly improve our chances of making love stay.
TOM ROBBINS
Still Life with Woodpecker
Tom Robbins (born July 22, 1932) is an American novelist best known for his novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which was made into a movie in 1993 starring Uma Thurman, Lorraine Bracco, and Keanu Reeves.
A summer breeze can be very refreshing; but if we try to put it in a tin can so we can have it entirely to ourselves, the breeze will die. Our beloved is the same. He is like a breeze, a cloud, a flower. If you imprison him in a tin can, he will die. Yet many people do just that. They rob their loved one of his liberty, until he can no longer be himself. They live to satisfy themselves and use their loved one to help them fulfill that. That is not loving; it is destroying.
THICH NHAT HANH
Teachings on Love
Love is ... taking years to unpack their neuroses, then using the space you've made to store your own.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016
It is much easier to tell a woman you love her when you do not than when you do.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke
Every little thing wants to be loved.
SUE MONK KIDD
The Secret Life of Bees