quotations about love
Of all things in this world love is the most unmanageable. Parents and guardians are sadly foiled when they undertake to guide and coerce it: and the best thing they can do with it is to leave it to itself.
ROBERT BELL
The Ladder of Gold
Thy love is like deep waters all around--
Warm pulsing waters, in whose brooding sound
The lone wail of my heart is lulled with dreams,
And the far clamour of the world is drowned.
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love
Heav'nly love shall outdo Hellish hate.
JOHN MILTON
Paradise Lost
Love is the sum of all the arts, as it is the reason for their existence.
JACK LONDON
The Valley of the Moon
When love grows diseas'd, the best thing we can do is to put it to a violent death; I cannot endure the torture of a ling'ring and consumptive passion.
GEORGE ETHEREGE
The Man of Mode
Love cannot in its very nature be peaceful or content. It is a restlessness, an unsatisfaction. I can grant a lasting love just as I can grant a lasting unsatisfaction; but the lasting love cannot be coupled with possession, for love is pain and desire and possession is easement and fulfilment.
JACK LONDON
The Kempton-Wace Letters
To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I.'
AYN RAND
The Fountainhead
Since to be loved endures,
To love is wise.
ROBERT BRIDGES
Since to be Loved Endures
One of the remarkable things about love is that, despite very irritating people writing poems and songs about how pleasant it is, it really is quite pleasant.
DANIEL HANDLER
as Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
Love abounds in all things,
excels from the depths to beyond the stars,
is lovingly disposed to all things.
She has given the king on high
the kiss of peace.
HILDEGARD OF BINGEN
"Caritas abundat"
Some hold love to be for conquest, both of persons and of things,
But supreme love, all unheeding, straight forgets the gift it brings.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"Caelestis"
Edwin Leibfreed published several books of poetry, including A Garland of Verse (1910), A Soliloquy of Life (1915), and The Man of a Thousand Loves (1932).
Love is the impulse which directs the world,
And all things know it and obey its power.
Man, in the maelstrom of his passions whirled;
The bee that takes the pollen to the flower;
The earth, uplifting her bare, pulsing breast
To fervent kisses of the amorous sun;--
Each but obeys creative Love's behest,
Which everywhere instinctively is done.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"What Love Is"
Love is blind.
ENGLISH PROVERB
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Once you love someone it's like cancer. It spreads and spreads until it eats you up.
ANN WUEHLER
Interviews With Loneliness
Oh, my young friends, how delightful is the beginning of a love-business, and how undignified, sometimes, the end!
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The Virginians
All the love and joy that a man has ever received in perception is laid up in him as the sunshine of a hundred years is laid up in the bole of the oak.
COVENTRY PATMORE
The Rod, the Root, and the Flower
It isn't being happy together ... that makes one love--it's being unhappy together.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Ministry of Fear
Of all fires
love is the only inexhaustible one.
PABLO NERUDA
O Magazine, Feb. 2007
"To fall for," "to be fallen for"--I feel in these words something unspeakably vulgar, farcical, and at the same time extraordinarily complacent. Once these expressions put in an appearance, no matter how solemn the place, the silent cathedrals of melancholy crumble, leaving nothing but an impression of fatuousness. It is curious, but the cathedrals of melancholy are not necessarily demolished if one can replace the vulgar "What a messy business it is to be fallen for" by the more literary "What uneasiness lies in being loved."
OSAMU DAZAI
No Longer Human