quotations about love
Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections, as leaves are to the life of trees. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
American Note-Books, Mar. 9, 1853
Trust Love, nor fear to soar upon his track.
The wings that bore to Heaven will bear thee back.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.
DAN SIMMONS
The Fall of Hyperion
Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul.
JAMES JOYCE
notes for his play Exiles
Love -- is anterior to Life --
Posterior -- to Death --
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth.
EMILY DICKINSON
"Love is anterior to Life"
Ah, cruel 'tis to love,
And cruel not to love,
But cruelest of all
To love and love in vain.
ANACREON
"Ode XXIX", Odes
Love is a king who reigns without laws.
SPANISH PROVERB
Love is like a friendship caught on fire.
In the beginning a flame,
Very pretty, often hot and fierce
But still only light and flickering.
As love grows older, our hearts mature
And our love becomes as coals,
Deep-burning and unquenchable.
BRUCE LEE
attributed, Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew
The stage is more beholding to love, than the life of man; for as to the stage, love is even matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief; sometimes like a siren, sometimes like a fury.
JOHN LOCKE
"Of Love", The Conduct of the Understanding: Essays, Moral, Economical, and Political
Love seems to beautify and inspire all nature. It raises the earthly caterpillar into the ethereal butterfly, it paints the feathers in spring, it lights the glowworm's lamp, it wakens the song of birds, and inspires the poet's lay. Even inanimate Nature seems to feel the spell, and flowers glow with the richest colours.
JOHN LUBBOCK
The Use of Life
Love is in the fresh bottle of cold water that magically appears by your bedside lamp every night, because he knows you get thirsty when you get up to nurse the baby every two hours.
RASHA RUSHDY
"Love Is Sweatpants and Take-out, Actually", Huffington Post, February 14, 2016
The caresses over which love presides are always pure.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
If a thing loves, it is infinite.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Annotations to Swedenborg
But the most common species of love is that which first arises from beauty, and afterwards diffuses itself into kindness and into the bodily appetite. Kindness or esteem, and the appetite to generation, are too remote to unite easily together. The one is, perhaps, the most refined passion of the soul; the other the most gross and vulgar. The love of beauty is placed in a just medium betwixt them, and partakes of both their natures: From whence it proceeds, that it is so singularly fitted to produce both.
DAVID HUME
"Of the Amorous Passion, or Love Betwixt the Sexes", A Treatise of Human Nature
I've read more than a hundred books
Seeing love mentioned many thousand times
But despite all the places I've looked
It's still no clearer
I'm still no nearer
The meaning of love
DEPECHE MODE
"The Meaning of Love", A Broken Frame
My God, these folks don't know how to love -- that's why they love so easily.
D. H. LAWRENCE
letter to Blanche Jennings, May 8, 1909
David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 - 2 March 1930) was an English writer and poet. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection on the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization. His opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage".
Love is... carefully curated ignorance.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016
The music that inspires the souls of lovers exists within themselves and the private universe they occupy. They share it with each other; they do not share it with the tribe or with society. The courage to hear that music and to honor it is one of the prerequisites of romantic love.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
The Psychology of Romantic Love
Of the affairs of love ... my only advice is to be honest. That's your most powerful tool to unlock a heart or gain forgiveness.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
Eragon
Nothing goes far which has not the wings of love to make it buoyant, so that it can fly.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit