LOVE QUOTES IX
quotations about love
Unconditional love. That's what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return. All other giving is selfish. But he is being selfish a little, isn't he, by wanting her to love him in return? He hopes that she loves him in return. Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Reunion
True love is like a coin, changeless and pure,
Bright from the mint of virtuous affection,
Whose solid worth lies in its gold secure
Stamped with the soul's reflection;
Though Time may mar with rude and hasty hands
Its brilliancy and beauty,
Its gold unspoiled beneath the surface stands
Alloyed with common duty.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"Love's Counterfeits"
Surely, love is both work and wages.
RICHARD BAXTER
The Practical Works of the Rev. Richard Baxter
Love never goes away; it just changes form.
PAMELA ANDERSON
Esquire, Jan. 2005
Love is the key to felicity, nor is there a heaven to any who love not. We enter Paradise through its gates only.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?
LILY TOMLIN
attributed, Parted Lips: Lesbian Love Quotes Through the Ages
I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
Among the blessings of love there is hardly one more exquisite than the sense that in uniting the beloved life to ours we can watch over its happiness, bring comfort where hardship was, and over memories of privation and suffering open the sweetest fountains of joy.
GEORGE ELIOT
Daniel Deronda
Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.
UMBERTO ECO
The Island of the Day Before
True love is a durable fire,
In the mind ever burning.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
As Ye Came from the Holy Land
Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1552 - 1618) was an English writer, poet, soldier, politician, courtier, spy, and explorer. He is also well known for popularizing tobacco in England.
Strange
indeed how love in other
ways so particular
will pick a corner
in that charnel-house
tidy it and coil up there, perhaps
even fall asleep--her face
turned to the wall!
CHINUA ACHEBE
Attento, Soul Brother!
Love, like reputation, once fled, never returns more.
APHRA BEHN
The History of the Nun
Aphra Behn (1640 - 1689) was an English playwright, poet, and novelist from the Restoration era. As one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, she broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors.
Love -- bittersweet, irrepressible -- loosens my limbs and I tremble.
SAPPHO
"To Atthis"
Sappho (c. 630 - c. 570 BC) was a Greek poet from the island of Lesbos. Although most of her poetry is now lost, she was regarded in ancient times as one of the greatest lyric poets and given names such as the "Tenth Muse" and "The Poetess," just as Homer was called "the Poet."
In this day and age, love is temporary and marriage is unnatural--the product of Madison Avenue advertising executives and television producers.
MICHAEL PALMER
The Fifth Vial
Among all methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as this gust of feverish agitation that sweeps over us from time to time. For then the die is cast, the person whose company we enjoy at that moment is the person we shall henceforward love. It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when -- in this moment of deprivation -- the quest is for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage -- the insensate, agonizing need to possess exclusively.
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
Some people, right away, do know each other deeply. Love gives them insight into each other. Love makes them pledge themselves to each other. Love makes them inventive. Yes, it also makes them ridiculous. But that's just another of love's glories. It makes being ridiculous permissible.
JAMES KUZNER
"Should we scoff at the idea of love at first sight?", The Conversation, August 30, 2018
James Kuzner is Associate Professor of English at Brown University. With a specialty in early modern literature, his research tends to focus on the relationship between literature, selfhood, and political imagination.
Running like a river trying to find the ocean
Flowers in the concrete
Climbing over fences, blooming in the shadows
Places that you can't see
Coming through the melody when the night bird sings
Love is a wild thing, yeah
KACEY MUSGRAVES
"Love Is a Wild Thing"
Love, which, in concert with Abstinence, established Faith, and which, along with Patience, builds up Chastity, is like the columns that sustain the four corners of a house. For it was that same Love which planted a glorious garden redolent with precious herbs and noble flowers--roses and lilies--which breathed forth a wondrous fragrance, that garden on which the true Solomon was accustomed to feast his eyes.
HILDEGARD OF BINGEN
letter to the Monk Guibert, 1176
Love, slow and gradual in its growth, is too much like friendship ever to be a violent passion.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Affections", Les Caractères
Jean de La Bruyère (16 August 1645 - 11 May 1696) was a French philosopher and moralist noted for his satire. His Caractères, which appeared in 1688, captures the psychological, social, and moral profile of French society of his time.
Love, how many roads to reach a kiss.
PABLO NERUDA
"Love, How many Roads to Reach a Kiss"