quotations about love
If you believe yourself unfortunate, because you have "loved and lost," perish the thought. One who has loved truly, can never lose entirely. Love is whimsical and temperamental. Its nature is ephemeral, and transitory. It comes when it pleases, and goes away without warning. Accept and enjoy it while it remains, but spend no time worrying about its departure. Worry will never bring it back.
NAPOLEON HILL
Think and Grow Rich
Love is a moral drunkenness; and, whilst it lasts, the shrew seems gentle, the tigress a dove, the flirt constant, and the fiend an angel.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY
The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos
To a person in love, the value of the individual is intuitively known. Love needs no logic for its mission. It roots in a bare wisdom that exists in senses more than mind, a wisdom that, in primitive form, evolved the mind which so often overlooks it.
CHARLES LINDBERGH
Autobiography of Values
When a plain-looking woman is loved, it is certain to be very passionately; for either her influence on her lover is irresistible, or she has some secret and more irresistible charms than those of beauty.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Affections", Les Caractères
Jean de La Bruyère (16 August 1645 - 11 May 1696) was a French philosopher and moralist noted for his satire. His Caractères, which appeared in 1688, captures the psychological, social, and moral profile of French society of his time.
Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.
HONORE DE BALZAC
A Woman of Thirty
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex.
JULIAN BARNES
Talking It Over
The truth about love is that it is ever changing. Throughout the life of a relationship, individuals change and life itself changes. Love has to be flexible enough to accommodate new information, new roles, and new ways of loving one another.
PATRICIA LOVE
The Truth About Love
The weight of love
Has buoyed me up
Till my head
Knocks against the sky.
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
O Magazine, Feb. 2007
Man loves most that which is his own.
HENRY ADAMS
Historical Essays
Love is the possibility of possibilities. Its farthest reach is beyond us, no matter how long we love or how much. It will always remain the mute mystery to whose ecstasy and ache we can only surrender with a yes.
DAVID RICHO
How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving
Our love is a harsh cord
that binds us wounding us
and if we want
to leave our wound,
to separate,
it makes a new knot for us and condemns us
to drain our blood and burn together.
PABLO NERUDA
"The Furies"
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
Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful molder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State- and Church-begotten weed, marriage?
EMMA GOLDMAN
Anarchism and Other Essays
To love is to destroy, and ... to be loved is to be the one destroyed.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Bones
Love is like a friendship caught on fire.
In the beginning a flame,
Very pretty, often hot and fierce
But still only light and flickering.
As love grows older, our hearts mature
And our love becomes as coals,
Deep-burning and unquenchable.
BRUCE LEE
attributed, Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew
The affections are like lightning: you cannot tell where they will strike till they have fallen.
HENRI-DOMINIQUE LACORDAIRE
attributed, A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern
Wisdom and love have nothing to do with one another. Wisdom is staying alive, survival. You're wise if you don't stick your finger in the light plug. Love -- you'll stick your finger in anything.
ROBERT ALTMAN
attributed, Esquire the Meaning of Life: Wisdom, Humor, and Damn Good Advice from 64 Extraordinary Lives
I'll tell you ... what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter -- as I did!
CHARLES DICKENS
Great Expectations
The only everyday and eternal reality was love.
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Well they say that love is in the air, but never is it clear,
How to pull it close and make it stay
Butterflies are free to fly, and so they fly away
And I'm left to carry on and wonder why
SHERYL CROW
"Always on Your Side"