quotations about love
In my youth and comparative inexperience I had always regarded the yearning and pangs of love as the worst torture that could afflict the human heart. At this moment, however, I began to realize that there was another and perhaps grimmer torture than that of longing and desiring: that of being loved against one's will and of being unable to defend oneself against the urgency of another's passion; of seeing another human being seared by the flame of her desire and of having to look impotently, lacking the power, the capacity, the strength to pluck her from the flames.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
Love is the poetry of the senses. It has the destiny of all that which is great in man and of all that which proceeds from his thought. Either it is sublime, or it is not. When once it exists, it exists forever and goes on always increasing. This is the love which the ancients made the child of heaven and earth.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Love is the medicine of all moral evil. By it the world is to be cured of sin.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Love has both honey and gall in abundance.
ROMAN PROVERB
Love has become but a dream and desire in minds free to dream and desire the unattainable. Love has become the great make-believe of adult play. Love is an imaginary pirouette amidst the lock-steps of realities. Love is a luxuriating in the racial cradle of temperament. Love is a cunning dipsomania carried about in public like the black bottle hugged beneath an old lady's shawl. Love is many things, and plays strange roles in the mind of humanity today; and for the indulgence of its delicate emotional calisthenics man has provided the theater and books and many other brilliant exploitations of lucrative fiction.
MARIAN COX
"The Fools of Love", The Dry Rot of Society and Other Essays
Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it. Everyone desires love but also finds it impossible to believe that he deserves it.
JAMES BALDWIN
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
The longer the road to love, the keener is the pleasure.
ANDRE MAUROIS
An Art of Living
Oh love, rose made wet by mermaids and foams, fire that dances and climbs up the invisible stairs and awakens the blood in the tunnel of sleeplessness.
PABLO NERUDA
"The Month of March Returns with its Hidden Light"
Not to love is in love an infallible means of being loved.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Love is a warm brain, not a leaping heart.
TIM LEBBON
Face
It is not the healthy, the confident, the proud, the joyous, the happy, that one must love -- they have no need of one's love! Arrogant and indifferent, they accept love only as homage that is theirs to command, as their due. The devotion of another is to them a mere embellishment, an ornament for the hair, a bracelet on the arm, not the whole meaning and bliss of their lives. Only those with whom life has dealt hardly, the wretched, the slighted, the uncertain, the unlovely, the humiliated, could really be helped by love. He who devotes his life to them atones to them for what life has taken from them. They alone know how to love and be loved as one should love -- gratefully and humbly.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
In order to be loved, we have to love, which means we have to understand.
THICH NHAT HANH
Teachings on Love
If two people are in love they can sleep on the blade of a knife.
EDWARD HOAGLAND
Balancing Acts
To love someone is to long to be loved by that someone.
CHRIS SEIDMAN
Little Buddy
Love: noun. The force that allows us to overcome our seemingly irreconcilable differences and empowers us to experience the peace of one-ness.
BURT GERSHATER
"Inner Heroes", Arizona Daily Sun, August 20, 2018
Love is what helps mothers lift cars off kids, it's what helps people in earthquakes lift boulders off people who are crushed.
BEN HERRING
"Former New Zealand star Ben Herring believes love is the best language when trying to motivate players", Daily Mail, September 1, 2016
There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick.
ANNE ENRIGHT
The Gathering
Of all the compound passions, which proceed from a mixture of love and hatred with other affections, no one better deserves our attention, than that love, which arises betwixt the sexes, as well on account of its force and violence, as those curious principles of philosophy, for which it affords us an uncontestable argument. It is plain, that this affection, in its most natural state, is derived from the conjunction of three different impressions or passions, viz. The pleasing sensation arising from beauty; the bodily appetite for generation; and a generous kindness or good-will. The origin of kindness from beauty may be explained from the foregoing reasoning. The question is how the bodily appetite is excited by it.
DAVID HUME
"Of the Amorous Passion, or Love Betwixt the Sexes", A Treatise of Human Nature
Love is the master of our lives,
And, e'en though happy subjects we,
We're governed by his scepter strong
Through time and through eternity.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Love's Melody"
Love is like the sea. It's a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Their Eyes Were Watching God