quotations about love
Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully.
ZIG ZIGLAR
See You at the Top
Love's tongue is in the eyes.
PHINEAS FLETCHER
Piscatory Eclogues
Free-market free love is simultaneously a utopian idea and a dystopian idea. The idea of total sexual freedom is an ideal, but then it's also a Michel Houellebecq nightmare. Now online dating and apps have made that normal. Everyone is "on the market" or "off the market"; friends with "benefits," "investing" time--these are all economic metaphors.
MOIRA WEIGEL
"Love in a Time of Capital: An Interview With Moira Weigel", The Nation, August 29, 2016
The stage is more beholding to love, than the life of man; for as to the stage, love is even matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief; sometimes like a siren, sometimes like a fury.
JOHN LOCKE
"Of Love", The Conduct of the Understanding: Essays, Moral, Economical, and Political
When a plain-looking woman is loved, it is certain to be very passionately; for either her influence on her lover is irresistible, or she has some secret and more irresistible charms than those of beauty.
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.
Man loves most that which is his own.
HENRY ADAMS
Historical Essays
We outgrow love like other things
And put it in the drawer,
Till it an antique fashion shows
Like costumes grandsires wore.
EMILY DICKINSON
"We Outgrow Love Like Other Things"
Love is a two-way street constantly under construction.
CARROLL BRYANT
blog post, September 19, 2012
Love is one of the last things that gives meaning and magic in a world where god is dead and nothing matters anymore.
BRENDAN O'CONNOR
"Love is ...", The Independent, February 15, 2016
Some things you can feel coming. You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. When you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.
UMBERTO ECO
Foucault's Pendulum
Love is not some mushy feeling for your parents that you are born with, or a romanticized sexuality you learn from magazines. It is action. If you know what love is you can never be in doubt about whether someone loves you or you love someone.
PETER ABRAHAMS
The Fury of Rachel Monette
You ought to love all mankind; nay, every individual of mankind. You ought not to love the individuals of your domestic circles less, but to love those who exist beyond it more.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"Essay on Christianity"
Our love is a harsh cord
that binds us wounding us
and if we want
to leave our wound,
to separate,
it makes a new knot for us and condemns us
to drain our blood and burn together.
PABLO NERUDA
"The Furies"
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
If somebody says "I love you" to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? "I love you, too."
KURT VONNEGUT
Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons
The affections are like lightning: you cannot tell where they will strike till they have fallen.
HENRI-DOMINIQUE LACORDAIRE
attributed, A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern
Man ever is and always shall be blessed; for he loves, and love is an onward current that never ebbs; and borne upon this current humanity will at last make its far, fair haven; and meanwhile, as it voyages, it will find the course not too rough, but glorified by frequent halcyon days and calm nights set with stars.
FRANK CUMMINS LOCKWOOD
Robert Browning
No form of love is wrong, so long as it is love.
D. H. LAWRENCE
The Ladybird
David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 - 2 March 1930) was an English writer and poet. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection on the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization. His opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage".
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
attributed, Zen Soup: Tasty Morsels of Wisdom from Great Minds
We love being in love, that's the truth on't. If we had not met Joan, we should have met Kate, and adored her. We know our mistresses are no better than many other women, nor no prettier, nor no wiser, nor no wittier. 'Tis not for these reasons we love a woman, or for any special quality or charm I know of; we might as well demand that a lady should be the tallest woman in the world, like the Shropshire giantess, as that she should be a paragon in any other character, before we began to love her.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond