quotations about love
Love is the secret you unmask yourself to find; it is the foundation of the spiritual life, the destination where all roads of the journey lead.
ELIZABETH LESSER
The Seeker's Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure
Among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is the strongest and most enduring: when passion comes to unite its force to long affection, love is at its spring-tide.
GEORGE ELIOT
Mr. Gilfil's Love Story
To me, love is a pure idea forged in flesh, awkwardly maybe, but it had to connect to somewhere, despite twists and turns of underground cable. An all-too-perfect thing. Sometimes the lines get crossed. Or you get a wrong number. But that's nobody's fault. It'll always be like that, so long as we exist in this physical form. As a matter of principle.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Dance, Dance, Dance
Love is a religion, and its rituals cost more than those of other religions. It goes by quickly and, like a street urchin, it likes to mark its passage by a trail of devastation.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Pere Goriot
It may be true that love is blind, but only for what is ugly: its sight is keen enough for what is beautiful.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
In seeing there is love, in being seen there is abhorrence. One grins, trying to bear the pain of being seen. But not just anyone can be someone who only looks. If the one who is looked at looks back, then the person who was looking becomes the one who is looked at.
KOBO ABE
The Box Man
Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Plague of Doves
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
Love isn't like money--the more you give away the more you get back, and the more you have to give.
S. M. STIRLING
The Sunrise Lands
Love is a farthing piece, a bloody bribe pressed in the palm of God and thrown away.
STELLA BENSON
This Is the End
Love's a fire that needs renewal
Of fresh beauty for its fuel.
THOMAS CAMPBELL
Freedom and Love
My love is hopeless! I know it. But it will feed me to my dying day.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol
As a drop of honey is dissipated and lost in a pail of water, so the sweet affection of love would totally vanish through too extensive a diffusion.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
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 is said to be an involuntary passion, and it is, therefore, contended that it cannot be resisted. This is true in part only, for like all things else, when nourished and supplied plentifully with ailment, it is rapid in its progress; but let these be withdrawn and it may be stifled in its birth or much stinted in its growth.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to Eleanor Parke Custis, Jan. 16, 1795
It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
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 has this in common with scruples, that it becomes embittered by the reflections and the thoughts that beset us to free ourselves.
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 is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Written on the Body
For me, love is the never-ending question. It is confusing. It is the answer, but it is also inundated with contradictions and complications.
JENNIFER LOPEZ
"Jennifer Lopez: Still Wild at Heart", Glamour