quotations about love
Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
Burning with tender love is not really an image for someone who has warmed mercury over a gentle flame. In slowness, gentleness, and hope we have the hidden force of moral perfection and of material transmutation.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Formation of the Scientific Mind
Life is a song. Love is the music.
ANONYMOUS
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
Love can make any place agreeable.
ARABIAN PROVERB
Love subdues everything, except the felon heart.
FRENCH PROVERB
Life is short and we never have enough time for the hearts of those who travel the way with us. O, be swift to love!
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"The Buried Life"
None but those who have loved can be supposed to understand the oratory of the eye, the mute eloquence of a look, or the conversational powers of the face. Love's sweetest meanings are unspoken; the full heart knows no rhetoric of words, and resorts to the pantomime of sighs and glances.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.
ANITA BROOKNER
A Friend from England
Love is the cheapest of religions.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, Dec. 21, 1939
Love needs its martyrs
Needs its sacrifices
They live for your beauty
And pay for their vices
Love will be the death of
My lonely soul brothers
But their spirits shall live on in
The hearts of all lovers
DEPECHE MODE
"The Love Thieves", Ultra
Of all earthly music, that which reaches the farthest into heaven is the beating of a loving heart.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Had we never lov'd sae kindly,
Had we never lov'd sae blindly,
Never met -- or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
ROBERT BURNS
Ae Fond Kiss
Not the swart Pariah in some Indian grove,
Lone, lean, and hunted by his brother's hate,
Hath drunk so deep the cup of bitter fate
As that poor wretch who cannot, cannot love:
He bears a load which nothing can remove,
A killing, withering weight.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"The Solitary"
Love is like infinity: You can't have more or less infinity, and you can't compare two things to see if they're "equally infinite." Infinity just is, and that's the way I think love is, too.
FRED ROGERS
The World According to Mister Rogers
A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.
AMY HEMPEL
"The Dog of the Marriage"
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"For What Binds Us"
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
True love always brings joy to ourselves and to the one we love. If our love does not bring joy to both of us, it is not true love.
THICH NHAT HANH
Teachings on Love