LOVE QUOTES XII
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 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"
He who falls in love in bars doesn't need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan.
UMBERTO ECO
Foucault's Pendulum
When there is love, you can live even without happiness.
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
Notes From Underground
Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind of delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Never Give All the Heart", In the Seven Woods
Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Brothers Karamazov
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
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
Love is not enough to keep a marriage intact but it is necessary for keeping it strong, healthy, and enjoyable. If a couple is not in love, over time, they will find themselves lacing in the drive they need to make their marriage work. Think of love like fuel; without it, a relationship will eventually break down and stop moving. Being in a loveless marriage is no fun.
VIKKI ZIEGLER
"The Top 7 Reasons Why Marriages Last", Huffington Post, November 14, 2017
Love is a spy who is plotting treason,
In league with that warm, red rebel, the Heart.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Communism"
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
To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But, then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love, to be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy, therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness -- I hope you're getting this down.
WOODY ALLEN
Love and Death
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
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY
Wind, Sand and Stars
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
There's nothing deader than a dead love.
LEONA HELMSLEY
Playboy, Nov. 1990
The problem with love these days is that society has taught the human race to stare at people with their eyes rather than their souls.
CHRISTOPHER POINDEXTER
Remington Typewriter Poetry
Sudden love takes the longest time to be cured.
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.
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"
Love's tendrils round the heart doth twine,
As round the oak doth cling the vine.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Love's Language"