LOVE QUOTES XIV
quotations about love
In my youth and comparative inexperience I had always regarded the yearning and pangs of love as the worst torture that could afflict the human heart. At this moment, however, I began to realize that there was another and perhaps grimmer torture than that of longing and desiring: that of being loved against one's will and of being unable to defend oneself against the urgency of another's passion; of seeing another human being seared by the flame of her desire and of having to look impotently, lacking the power, the capacity, the strength to pluck her from the flames.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
All love that has not friendship for its base,
Is like a mansion built upon the sand.
Though brave its walls as any in the land,
And its tall turrets lift their heads in grace;
Though skilful and accomplished artists trace
Most beautiful designs on every hand,
And gleaming statues in dim niches stand,
And fountains play in some flow'r-hidden place:
Yet, when from the frowning east a sudden gust
Of adverst fate is blown, or sad rains fall
Day in, day out, against its yielding wall,
Lo! the fair structure crumbles to the dust.
Love, to endure life's sorrow and earth's woe,
Needs friendship's solid masonwork below.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Upon the Sand"
Love, such as it is in society, is only the exchange of two fantasies, and the contact of two bodies.
SEBASTIEN R. N. CHAMFORT
Maximes et pensées
At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I'd quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Animal Dreams
If you have love in you, it's a strength. But if you are in love, it's a weakness.
SERGEI LUKYANENKO
Day Watch
Whoever said "You can't buy love" probably never went into a pet shop!
TOM WILSON
Ziggy, Jan. 29, 1998
Love is happiness, but only when you believe it will last forever. Even though every time it turns out to be a lie, it's only faith that gives love its strength and joy.
SERGEI LUKYANENKO
Night Watch
In love, all the contradictions of existence merge themselves and are lost. In love loss and gain are harmonised. In its balance sheet, credit and debit accounts are in the same column and gifts are added to gains.
SWAMI ABHEDANANDA
"Realisation in Love", The Free Press Journal, August 21, 2018
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
A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love.
SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents
Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Cat's Eye
Margaret Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. Her works encompass a variety of themes including gender and identity, religion and myth, the power of language, climate change, and "power politics".
Any human love a man gets he can make fill his life. It's like the grain of mustard-seed.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
Where Love Is
Love makes you do crazy things. Right, and alcohol makes you drink too much. It's romantic to think that love is this uncontrollable force that sweeps us off our feet. "You can't help whom you love." "I can't help myself, I'm in love." "I have no choice but to love you." That all sounds amazing, until we consider that an uncontrollable force can't be promised or predicted. We can't commit to love that we're not responsible for. We can't give love that we don't own. If a gust of wind knocked you off your feet, you couldn't turn and offer that wind to the person behind you for as long as you both shall live. So maybe the most romantic thing someone can say to you is, "I have full capacity over all my faculties. I'm in total control. I'm thinking very clearly. I'm choosing to give you my love, because you deserve it."
JULIE MITCHELL
"Love is not written in the stars", Corsicana Daily Sun, November 6, 2017
They stayed together and watched each other slowly become strangers, watched their love die as you watch a great old gum tree succumb to dieback.
RICHARD FLANAGAN
The Unknown Terrorist
The stage is more beholding to love than the life of man. For as to the stage, love is ever matter of comedies and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief, sometimes like a Siren, sometimes like a Fury.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
Mysterious love, uncertain treasure, hast thou more of pain or pleasure! Chill'd with tears, kill'd with fears, endless torments dwell about thee: yet who would live, and live without thee!
JOSEPH ADDISON
Rosamond
Life is too short to not spend it with the people you love, I murmured. Did you just read an Instagram caption? my boyfriend asked. I huffed. I said that it was a midnight musing--not an Instagram caption. But it's true. To me, at least. From reading children's books to books about death and illness and meaning and regret, I gather that this abstraction--love!--that poets wax on about and singers warble on about and writers scribble on about is what matters most. It isn't money or material items or career or achievements or resumé markers or positions or charm. It's the simple, deceptively simple! equation of existence: to love and to be loved.
LU
"To Love and To Be Loved", coolpeppermint, June 8, 2018
You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Deathless
Violent people usually express their love of a thing by their hatred of its opposite.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
We value love not because it's stronger than death but because it's weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead