LOVE QUOTES XL

quotations about love

Love is a confidence trick, that's all. It's Nature's way of suckering a mammal with a brain and a long, vulnerable gestation period into reproducing. Humans can think, so ordinary animal-grade maternal instinct wouldn't be enough to make human women go through all that, not if they stopped and thought about what's involved. So you have love. It's a substitute for rational thought.

K. J. PARKER

Evil for Evil


I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.

NORMAN MAILER

Harlot's Ghost


When we consider the lofty character of love, and remember his wonderful helpfulness to man, it would seem that he could have no opposition in his work, nor enemies under the sun; yet there is a whole bunch of fellows who are constantly antagonizing love. Among them are anger, hatred, revenge, envy, and jealousy. Love will have no fellowship with these, and if any one of them is admitted into the heart love goes out.

NICIAS BALLARD COOKSEY

Helps to Happiness


Love is a very ancient force, which served its purpose in its day but no longer is essential for the survival of the species.

FRANK HERBERT

Heretics of Dune

Tags: Frank Herbert


Love is in that moment when you're in separate rooms trying to get the kids to sleep, and you unexpectedly get butterflies in your stomach because you're excited that you get to hang out with your best friend soon. It's in that conversation on the couch in your sweatpants eating Pad Thai out of a box while you exchange stories about things your children did and replay videos of them being adorable even though they've only been asleep for five minutes.

RASHA RUSHDY

"Love Is Sweatpants and Take-out, Actually", Huffington Post, February 14, 2016


Love is a volcano, the crater of which no wise man will approach too nearly, lest ... he should be swallowed up.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

Lacon

Charles Caleb Colton (1777 - 1832) was an English cleric and writer. His books, including collections of epigrammatic aphorisms and short essays on conduct, though now almost forgotten, had a phenomenal popularity in their day.


Love is an immortal wound that cannot be closed up. A person loses something, a part of her soul, when she loves someone. And she goes about looking for that lost part of her soul, for she knows that otherwise she is incomplete and cannot be at rest. It is only when she is with the person she loves that she becomes complete again in herself; but the moment he leaves, she loses that part which he has taken with him and knows no rest till she has found him once more.

LIN YUTANG

Moment in Peking

Tags: Lin Yutang


We are told from an early age that our true love is out there, waiting for us and so we yearn to find them, to know what it feels like to experience true love, to know you have made the right choice. The truth about love is that it is often bewildering and unknowable. You may never know if you have made the right choice. But when love is true, you embrace all the unknowns, regardless.

ROXANNE GAY

"Where the Hell Is the Love of My Life?", New York Times, October 18, 2018


Choose to love whomsoever thou wilt: all else will follow.

ST. AUGUSTINE

On the Mystical Body of Christ

Tags: St. Augustine


Love alone was left, as a great image of a dream that was erased.

ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE

"The Valley", Poetical Meditations

Tags: Alphonse de Lamartine


There is not on earth so base a knave as the man who wins the love of a woman when he knows that he cannot or ought not to requite it.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.

JOHN UPDIKE

Rabbit Redux

Tags: John Updike


I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

Sexing the Cherry


Love is a concept none of us really understand but yet we try to define it in the small square of accepted norms. When two people love each other and want to be together in more than one way, gender, society, age, caste, creed stops mattering.

SHRIYA JOSHI

"This Short Film About Freedom To Love Is Our Gift To You On Independence Day", Storypick, August 12, 2016


We had known each other for many years; starved together, worked together, loved each other, suffered each other, made love; and yet the most tremendous consummation of our love was occurring now, as she patiently, in love and terror, held my hand.

JAMES BALDWIN

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

Tags: James Baldwin


Such as are excited by the gentler influence of Love assume more of affection in their looks, sink their voice into greater softness, and manifest in their gestures greater nobleness of soul.

XENOPHON

The Banquet

Tags: Xenophon


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

Tags: Kobo Abe


Love is blind.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

The Canterbury Tales

Tags: Geoffrey Chaucer


How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.

GRAHAM GREENE

The End of the Affair


Her heart consenteth before her lips say: Yea; and in this interval lieth her Paradise; wherefore she would prolong it.

GELETT BURGESS

The Maxims of Methuselah