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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
Love! Love until the night collapses!
PABLO NERUDA, "Come Up with Me"
Love is my religion--I could die for that.
JOHN KEATS, letter to Fanny Brawne, Oct. 13, 1819
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
A capacity for hating the object of desire is, perhaps, the best cure for love in cases of disappointment.
NORMAN MACDONALD, Maxims and Moral Reflections
Love renders the proud humble, and tames the fierce; it is at once the most and the least selfish of all passions; for, whilst it would engross the being on whom it is lavished, it will make any sacrifice, or undergo any privation, to insure the comfort of her it would possess.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY, The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos
Love differs from all the other contagious diseases: the last time a man is exposed to it, he takes it most readily, and has it the worst!
BRET HARTE, "Two Men of Sandy Bar"
In love, we are best pleased when we please others.
NORMAN MACDONALD, Maxims and Moral Reflections
A lover is often most unjustly ridiculed for investing the woman for whom he has a passion, with qualities and feelings that she may not in reality possess; but in this, as in most cases, the world delights to judge unkindly; for it ought not to be overlooked that he is merely clothing the idol of his affections with his own beautiful conceptions of what she should be--transferring to her a superiority of sentiment which, in fact, belongs to himself, since it must have existed in his own mind before it could have been brought forward to adorn that of another. The pleasures of the world are all in imagination, else what a curse would existence be!
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY, The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos
In love, first please the eye, then win the heart.
NORMAN MACDONALD, Maxims and Moral Reflections
All human actions are motivated at their deepest level by two emotions--fear or love. In truth there are only two emotions--only two words in the language of the soul.... Fear wraps our bodies in clothing, love allows us to stand naked. Fear clings to and clutches all that we have, love gives all that we have away. Fear holds close, love holds dear. Fear grasps, love lets go. Fear rankles, love soothes. Fear attacks, love amends.
NEALE DONALD WALSCH, Conversations with God
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.
Enjoyment inflames love in some men, and extinguishes it in others: the wind that assists large vessels, upsets small ones.
NORMAN MACDONALD, Maxims and Moral Reflections
LOVE.--A sentiment we all entertain for ourselves, and occasionally imagine others entertain for us.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM, The Maxims of Marmaduke
Love is an artful arrangement of artless pretensions, whereby we labor to appear innocent in what we desire to be most cunning.
NORMAN MACDONALD, Maxims and Moral Reflections
Though love and hatred are as opposites as fire and water, yet do they sometimes subsist in the breast together towards the same person; nay by their very opposition and desire to destroy each other, are they strengthened and increased.
FULKE GREVILLE, Maxims, Characters and Reflections
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
Violent people usually express their love of a thing by their hatred of its opposite.
NORMAN MACDONALD, Maxims and Moral Reflections
You can't make me love you.
Love will sacrifice more to others than friendship, but then it exacts more from them.
FULKE GREVILLE, Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
- Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
- Is--Love, forgive us!--cinders, ashes, dust;
- Love in a palace is perhaps at last
- More grievous torment than a hermit's fast.
At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz"
The great unrequited love tears open your heart to the beauty of the world, its small rivers and upland meadows. It also makes you kinder to the next hundred thousand persons who cross your path.
GARRISON KEILLOR, "Life's Variety Pack," A Prairie Home Companion, Nov. 3, 2009
Few people love with the violence they hate.
NORMAN MACDONALD, Maxims and Moral Reflections
- To men of a certain type
- The suspicion that they are incapable of loving
- Is as disturbing to their self-esteem
- As, in cruder men, the fear of impotence.
T. S. ELIOT, The Cocktail Party
Love can make people do funny things, inexplicable things. And thwarted love can turn some people into madmen--or madwomen. People who never had much of a grip on reality, sometimes they spin pretty illusions ... and when the illusion shatters, they become capable of anything.
SUSANNE ALLEYN, Game of Patience
Love leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once.
MIKHAIL BULGAKOV, The Master and Margarita
What amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy--and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.
ANNE ENRIGHT, The Gathering
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