quotations about love
Could there be finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very essence of love?
JANE AUSTEN
Pride and Prejudice
Take away love, and our earth is a tomb!
ROBERT BROWNING
"Fra Lippo Lippi"
Every genuine expression of love grows out of a consistent and total surrender to God.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Christmas sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, 1957
There are many kinds of love, as many kinds of light,
And every kind of love makes a glory in the night.
There is love that stirs the heart, and love that gives it rest,
But the love that leads life upward is the noblest and the best.
HENRY VAN DYKE
"Love and Light"
Love makes a few weeks so rich that all the rest of our lives seems poor in comparison.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Love wasn't the soft, silky words the poets spoke of. Love, with it's twin edges, was the one factor that weakened so many women, that pushed them to compromise their own wants, their own needs for the needs and wants of another.
NORA ROBERTS
Sweet Revenge
We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept--our own selves--that we love.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
Days will come when the magic of the senses shall fade. And when this enchantment has fled, then it first becomes evident whether we are truly worthy of love.
T. S. ARTHUR
"The Evening Before Marriage", Orange Blossoms
In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook
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
We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
You are wrong if you think you cannot live without love. I cannot live without it. I do not mean that I go into a decline, develop odd symptoms, became a caricature. I mean that I cannot live well without it. I cannot think or act or speak or write or even dream with any kind of energy in the absence of love. I feel excluded from the living world. I become cold, fish-like, immobile. I implode.
ANITA BROOKNER
Hotel du Lac
The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Conversations with Samuel R. Delany
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 demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Written on the Body
Love is the desire to give, not to receive, something. Love is the art of producing something with the other's talents.
BERTOLT BRECHT
"Love of Whom?"
Who strikes man with love -- God or the Devil?
LEONID ANDREYEV
He Who Gets Slapped
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
ANAIS NIN
attributed, French Writers of the Past
Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903 - January 14, 1977) was a French-Cuban American diarist, essayist, novelist and writer of short stories and erotica. Nin's most studied works are her diaries or journals, which detail her marriages to Hugh Parker Guiler and Rupert Pole, in addition to her numerous affairs, including those with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and writer Henry Miller.
A pair of bright eyes with a dozen glances suffice to subdue a man; to enslave him, and enflame him; to make him even forget; they dazzle him so that the past becomes straightway dim to him; and he so prizes them that he would give all his life to possess 'em.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
Love is ownership. We own whom we love. The universe is God's because he loves.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts