quotations about love
All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase--"I love you."
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
"The Offshore Pirate"
The imagination of a eunuch dwells more and longer upon the material of love than that of man or woman ... supplying, so far as he can, by speculation, the place of pleasures he can no longer enjoy.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
journal, Apr. 4, 1831
False love is like the counterfeiter's coin,
A criminal deception.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"Love's Counterfeits"
Love is the centre and circumference;
The cause and aim of all things--'tis the key
To joy and sorrow, and the recompense
For all the ills that have been, or may be.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"What Love Is"
Love! dearest, sweetest power! how much are we indebted to thee! How much superior are even thy miseries to the pleasures which arise from other sources!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Dec. 20, 1810
A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.
AMY HEMPEL
"The Dog of the Marriage"
There is no balm of Gilead,
No salve, no soothing ointment
To stay the pain of one who's had
In love a disappointment--
Unless it be that healing lotion
Of fixing on a new devotion.
RICHARD ARMOUR
"Pastures New"
O, human love! thou spirit given,
On Earth, of all we hope in Heaven!
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"Tamerlane"
Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"The Buried Life"
Love for those too easily won does not last long.
ROMAN PROVERB
Love enters a man through his eyes, a woman through her ears.
POLISH PROVERB
Love begins at home.
GERMAN PROVERB
Love is like dew that falls on both nettles and lilies.
SWEDISH PROVERB
Love is blind.
ENGLISH PROVERB
Life is a song. Love is the music.
ANONYMOUS
Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it.
WOODY ALLEN
A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
You say love is a temple, love a higher law
Love is a temple, love the higher law.
You ask me to enter, but then you make me crawl
And I can't be holding on to what you got, when all you got is hurt.
U2
"One", Achtung Baby
That adoration which a young man gives to a woman whom he feels to be greater and better than himself, is hardly distinguishable from religious feeling. What deep and worthy love is so? whether of woman or child, or art or music. Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies, all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
We look at the one little woman's face we love, as we look at the face of our mother earth, and see all sorts of answers to our own yearnings.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king.
EMMA GOLDMAN
"Marriage and Love", Anarchism and Other Essays