quotations about love
Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in his glowing hands;
Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.
Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.
ALFRED TENNYSON
Locksley Hall
Love's fire colors once our neutral form, to blacken to eternal embers.
ELISE PUMPELLY CABOT
"Arizona"
Love, as the poet says, is like the spring. It grows on you and seduces you slowly and gently, but it holds tight like the roots of a tree. You don't know until you're ready to go that you can't move, that you would have to mutilate yourself in order to be free. That's the feeling. It doesn't last, at least it doesn't have to. But it holds on like a steel claw in your chest. Even if the tree dies, the roots cling to you. I've seen men and women give up everything for love that once was.
WALTER MOSLEY
The Man in My Basement
Love--what a volume in a word, an ocean in a tear,
A seventh heaven in a glance, a whirlwind in a sigh,
The lightning in a touch, a millennium in a moment,
What concentrated joy or woe in blest or blighted love!
For it is that native poetry springing up indigenous to Mind,
The heart's own-country music thrilling all its chords,
The story without an end that angels throng to hear,
The word, the king of words, carved on Jehovah's heart!
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Oh, ill betide that villain love, not love,
That all its object and affection finds
In the mere contact of encircling arms!
PEDRO CALDERON DE LA BARCA
The Painter of His Own Dishonour
People try to reconcile you to a disappointment in love by asking why you should cherish a passion for an object that has proved itself worthless. Had you known this before, you would not have encouraged the passion; but that having been once formed, knowledge does not destroy it. If we have drank poison, finding it out does not prevent its being in our veins: so passion leaves its poison in the mind!
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
That adoration which a young man gives to a woman whom he feels to be greater and better than himself, is hardly distinguishable from religious feeling. What deep and worthy love is so? whether of woman or child, or art or music. Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies, all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
Though this faith in love as the one democratic, even universal, form of salvation open to us moderns is the result of a long religious history that saw divine love as the origin of human love and as the model to be imitated, it has paradoxically come into its own because of a decline in religious faith. It has been possible only because, since the end of the eighteenth century, love has increasingly filled the vacuum left by the retreat of Christianity.
SIMON MAY
Love: A History
Thy love is like deep waters all around--
Warm pulsing waters, in whose brooding sound
The lone wail of my heart is lulled with dreams,
And the far clamour of the world is drowned.
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love
A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills: to know that high initiation, she must often tread where it is hard to tread, and feel the chill air, and watch through darkness. It is not true that love makes things easy: it makes us choose what is difficult.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
A woman findeth in her last lover much of her first love; but a man seeth his next-to-the-last love, alway.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
Caressing reassures lovers that their love endures.
WITTER BYNNER
"Rose-Time"
Christians see love as a vertical (love for God) and horizontal (love for fellow human beings). Just as the vertical and horizontal wood or metal come together to form a cross, so also love for God and love for fellow human beings define the whole essence of love.
FRANCIS EWHERIDO
"Love is a cross", Vanguard, November 11, 2017
If dying, I yet live in a tender heart or two; nor am I lost and hopeless living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for me.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
Love ... Just Nature's way of getting one person to pay the bills for another person.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
Love always has its price, come whence it may.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
"Miss Harriet"
Love gives impetus and fruitfulness to life and to the journey of faith: without love, both life and faith remain sterile.
POPE FRANCIS
Vatican Radio, October 29, 2017
Love is ... letting them flirt with the person next door, because you understand they need to feel like anything is possible.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016
Love is a flower that grows in any soil, works its sweet miracles undaunted by autumn frost or winter snow, blooming fair and fragrant all the year, and blessing those who give and those who receive.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
Love is a stream that will find its course.
JAMAICAN PROVERB