quotations about love
Until Obi met Clara on board the cargo boat Sasa he had thought of love as another grossly over-rated European invention.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
We must rejoice when love is great, and pardon its excess, for love is the staff of life, and life without love is life in vain.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
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
You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love.
ROLAND BARTHES
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
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
Here is one of the most beautiful effects of love, its confidence not only in the present, but in the future as well. Cynics may declare that it is only the deceitful way nature uses to make human beings perform her will. To such a view all lovers are indifferent. In their confidence they bind themselves to one another, not for a day only, not even for a lifetime, but for eternity.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Love", Reactions and Other Essays Discussing Those States of Feeling and Attitude of Mind That Find Expression In Our Individual Qualities
I am coming to terms with the fact that loving someone requires a leap of faith, and that a soft landing is never guaranteed.
SARAH DESSEN
This Lullaby
I think love adds to everything. I'm an old softie about that. I think love is the most important thing in life. If you don't have [a relationship], you're always looking for one. It's the motivator, the driver.
SHERYL CROW
Dr. Drew interview, 2001
If love does not know how to give and take without restrictions, it is not love, but a transaction that never fails to lay stress on a plus and a minus.
EMMA GOLDMAN
"The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation"
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
Love is an amazing magnet.
NICHOLSON BAKER
Traveling Sprinkler
Love is woman's eternal spring and man's eternal fall. It is a game at which men must play against stacked cards, and without the slightest inkling of the trump.
HELEN ROWLAND
Inter-Collegiate World
Love, in this world, is like a seed taken from the tropics, and planted where the winter comes too soon; and it cannot spread itself in flower-clusters and wide-twining vines, so that the whole air is filled with the perfume thereof. But there is to be another summer for it yet. Care for the root now, and God will care for the top by and by.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Need we say it was not love,
Now that love is perished?
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
"Passer Mortuus Est"
Nothing is true but Love, nor aught of worth;
Love is the incense which doth sweeten earth.
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH
"Love"
People who are having a love-sex relationship are continuously lying to each other because the very nature of the relationship demands that they do, because you have to make a love object of this person, which means that you editorialize about them. You know? You cut out what you don't want to see, you add this if it isn't there. And so therefore you're building a lie.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
Truman Capote: Conversations
The only way to experience love is to buy it and have it installed in your head. But, like most technology, its shelf-life is limited.
GERMAIN LUSSIER
"Love Is a Gadget in This Upcoming Scott Eastwood Film", Gizmodo, August 15, 2016
The sweetness of human love is to be compared, therefore, to the sweetness of a flower, whose glowing colors and voluptuous fragrance are intended by Nature to attract the winged insects, whose visits are necessary for the fertilization of the seed. The color fades, the flower falls, the perfume vanishes, death soon follows after; but Nature is not mocked.
ARTHUR FOLEY WINNINGTON-INGRAM
"Love's Nature", Thoughts on Love and Death
To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honour -- the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Quiet American
True love survives all shocks: an affection originally produced by admiration for unusual beauty may not only survive the loss of that beauty, but may become more intense if the beauty has changed into ugliness through causes that bind the lovers together in tender associations.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life