People try to reconcile you to a disappointment in love by asking why you should cherish a passion for an object that has proved itself worthless. Had you known this before, you would not have encouraged the passion; but that having been once formed, knowledge does not destroy it. If we have drank poison, finding it out does not prevent its being in our veins: so passion leaves its poison in the mind!
WILLIAM HAZLITT, Characteristics
Love is a volcano, the crater of which no wise man will approach too nearly, lest ... he should be swallowed up.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon
Love is a boomering that returns to the thrower's hand.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
Love endeth like the chianti flask, its drops are bitter.
GELETT BURGESS, The Maxims of Methuselah
Ah, love, 'tis a sorrowful land!
KENNETH RAND, "The Old Lovers"
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
Love is an alliance of friendship and of lust; if the former predominate, it is a passion exalted and refined, but if the latter, gross and sensual.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon
A man in love prefers his passion to every other consideration, and is fonder of his mistress than he is of virtue. Should she prove vicious, she makes vice lovely in his eyes.
WILLIAM HAZLITT, Characteristics
Love dwindles by pairing.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
Her heart consenteth before her lips say: Yea; and in this interval lieth her Paradise; wherefore she would prolong it.
GELETT BURGESS, The Maxims of Methuselah
Nothing goes far which has not the wings of love to make it buoyant, so that it can fly.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
Love may turn to indifference with possession.
WILLIAM HAZLITT, Characteristics
Love is the medicine of all moral evil. By it the world is to be cured of sin.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
No man knoweth how another man maketh his love, for women tell not.
GELETT BURGESS, The Maxims of Methuselah
All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase--"I love you."
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, "The Offshore Pirate"
There is not on earth so base a knave as the man who wins the love of a woman when he knows that he cannot or ought not to requite it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
A woman findeth in her last lover much of her first love; but a man seeth his next-to-the-last love, alway.
GELETT BURGESS, The Maxims of Methuselah
If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.
LYNDA BARRY, attributed, The Surrendered Single
Marriage--what an abomination! Love--yes, but not marriage. Love cannot exist in marriage, because love is an ideal; that is to say, something not quite understood--transparencies, colour, light, a sense of the unreal. But a wife--you know all about her--who her father was, who her mother was, what she thinks of you and her opinion of the neighbours over the way. Where, then, is the dream, the au dela? There is none. I say in marriage an au dela is impossible ... the endless duet of the marble and the water, the enervation of burning odours, the baptismal whiteness of women, light, ideal tissues, eyes strangely dark with kohl, names that evoke palm trees and ruins, Spanish moonlight or maybe Persepolis. The monosyllable which epitomizes the ennui and the prose of our lives is heard not, thought not there--only the nightingale-harmony of an eternal yes. Freedom limitless; the Mahometan stands on the verge of the abyss, and the spaces of perfume and colour extend and invite him with the whisper of a sweet unending yes. The unknown, the unreal ... Thus love is possible, there is a delusion, an au dela.
GEORGE MOORE, Confessions of a Young Man
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
Love must be the same in all worlds.
Hurry not a woman's favor; neither forcer her hastily to surrender to thee. For she goeth into love as she goeth into the waters at the seashore; first a hand and then a lip goeth she in by littles. She diveth not, she leapeth not from the pier; but by gentle shocks and cries of protest she entereth slowly; yet when the waters of love encompass her, then she is supported. She swimmeth in her joy; she floateth on the tide of happiness.
GELETT BURGESS, The Maxims of Methuselah
The highest evidence that love exists is its readiness to overlook and pardon faults.
REUEN THOMAS, Thoughts for the Thoughtful
Love not only occupies the higher lobes of the brain, but crowds out the lower to make room for its expansion.
Love, like the cold bath, is never negative, it seldom leaves us where it finds us; if once we plunge into it, it will either heighten our virtues, or inflame our vices.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon
When we hear complaints of the wretchedness or vanity of human life, the proper answer to them would be that there is hardly any one who at some point or other has not been in love. If we consider the high abstraction of this feeling, its depth, its purity, its voluptuous refinement, even in the meanest breast, how sacred and how sweet it is, this alone may reconcile us to the lot of humanity. That drop of balm turns the bitter cup to a delicious nectar.
WILLIAM HAZLITT, Characteristics
He gives a ripe apple for an apple-blossom that changes an old love for a new.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
[Nature's] crown is Love. Only through Love can we come near her. She puts gulfs between all things, and all things strive to be interfused. She isolates everything, that she may draw everything together. With a few draughts from the cup of Love she repays for a life full of trouble.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
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