quotations about love
Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully.
ZIG ZIGLAR
See You at the Top
Love is a moral drunkenness; and, whilst it lasts, the shrew seems gentle, the tigress a dove, the flirt constant, and the fiend an angel.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY
The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos
It is most clearly in matters of love that people show the quality of their mental images and how they handle the problem of trying to make reality and images correspond. Some men, for example, have such rigid images of the ideal woman that they must marry that they will have no compromise. They never meet anyone who fits perfectly into the pattern they have in mind, so either they never marry or else they marry again and again, hoping that eventually they will find a woman of low melting point who will pour herself into the long prepared mould.
ERIC BERNE
The Mind in Action
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
The loves of men but vary in degrees--
They find no new expression for the flame.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Isaura"
I was thinking what a curious thing love is; only a sentiment, and yet it has power to make fools of men and slaves of women.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
A Long Fatal Love Chase
Who does not know of eyes, lighted by love once, where the flame shines no more?--of lamps extinguished, once properly trimmed and tended? Every man has such in his house. Such momentoes make our splendidest chambers look blank and sad; such faces seen in a day cast a gloom upon our sunshine. So oaths mutually sworn, and invocations of heaven, and priestly ceremonies, and fond belief, and love, so fond and faithful that it never doubted but that it should live for ever, are all of no avail towards making love eternal: it dies, in spite of the banns and the priest; and I have often thought there should be a visitation of the sick for it, and a funeral service, and an extreme unction, and an abi in pace. It has its course, like all mortal things--its beginning, progress, and decay. It buds and it blooms out into sunshine, and it withers and ends.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
Our love is about small days to build memories upon, simple adventures we experience together.
LINDSAY DETWILER
"True Love Is Built In The Simple Moments", Huffington Post, October 22, 2017
Let your love flow out on all living things.
WILLIAM STYRON
Sophie's Choice
Love is ... telling someone when they have crap between their teeth.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016
Some sigh and cry for love
Ah, but in Pa-ree they die for love
Some waste away for love
Just the same -- hooray for love!
LEO ROBIN
"Hooray for Love"
With the secularization of the Western world, we are turning to romantic love to give us what we once looked for in the realm of the divine. Transcendence, meaning, wholeness, and ecstasy.
ESTHER PEREL
"A top couples' therapist says our 'religion of romantic love' is making relationships harder", Business Insider, November 10, 2017
Love could never come to full fruition till it was destroyed.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
Fraternity
Love is like the wild rose-briar;
Friendship like the holly-tree.
The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms,
But which will bloom most constantly?
EMILY BRONTE
Love and Friendship
Oh, my young friends, how delightful is the beginning of a love-business, and how undignified, sometimes, the end!
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The Virginians
False love is like the counterfeiter's coin,
A criminal deception.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"Love's Counterfeits"
No love without bread and wine.
FRENCH PROVERB
What will a man not do when frantic with love? To what baseness will he not demean himself? What pangs will he not make others suffer, so that he may ease his selfish heart?
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
Love and death were what novels were about.
OAKLEY HALL
Love and War in California
We need to cooperate to survive, to subsist, to learn, to reproduce and to raise our children. Romantic and parental love is essentially the neurochemical reward for cooperating, which is cognitively quite difficult.
ANNA MACHIN
"What is love? You asked Google -- here's the answer", The Guardian, July 11, 2018