quotations about love
The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Fusees
Love demands that we stop asking "how can my wife/parent/sibling be better" and start asking "how can I make my wife/parent/sibling the happiest in the world?" Love demands death to self.
CHRIS STEFANICK
"Love is Easy Until It's Tested", National Catholic Register, March 19, 2016
Love. My golly, it sells diapers, don't it!
DAVID MAMET
Goldberg Street: Short Plays and Monologues
I love your letters. How far is that from saying I love you? Well--about a mile. Two miles.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Serpents of Paradise
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"
O little hour of Love, so wild and sweet!
I gave the world, thy honey-dew to eat;
And now the tear-sown pathway of the dead
Echoes the patter of thy flying feet.
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love
Love is ... knowing that, should it come to it, they would want you to hollow out their corpse and use the carcass as a one-man tent to keep warm. Should it come to it.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016
Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
G. K. CHESTERTON
attributed, Life is a Verb
It must be sad to outlive aught we love.
GEORGE ELIOT
The Spanish Gypsy
Love is blind; couch not his eyes.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
Ranthorpe
When love is full grown it has few words, and sometimes it growls them out.
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Old Gorgon Graham
Love is a wound that never heals.
GERMAN PROVERB
Falling in Love, as modern biology teaches us to believe, is nothing more than the latest, highest, and most involved exemplification, in the human race, of that almost universal selective process which Mr. Darwin has enabled us to recognise throughout the whole long series of the animal kingdom. The butterfly that circles and eddies in his aerial dance around his observant mate is endeavouring to charm her by the delicacy of his colouring, and to overcome her coyness by the display of his skill. The peacock that struts about in imperial pride under the eyes of his attentive hens, is really contributing to the future beauty and strength of his race by collecting to himself a harem through whom he hands down to posterity the valuable qualities which have gained the admiration of his mates in his own person. Mr. Wallace has shown that to be beautiful is to be efficient; and sexual selection is thus, as it were, a mere lateral form of natural selection--a survival of the fittest in the guise of mutual attractiveness and mutual adaptability, producing on the average a maximum of the best properties of the race in the resulting offspring. I need not dwell here upon this aspect of the case, because it is one with which, since the publication of the 'Descent of Man,' all the world has been sufficiently familiar.
GRANT ALLEN
"Falling in Love", Falling in Love and Other Essays
That feelings of love and hate make rational judgments impossible in public affairs, as in private affairs, we can clearly enough see in others, though not so clearly in ourselves.
HERBERT SPENCER
The Study of Sociology
Love is blind but sees afar.
ITALIAN PROVERB
Love receives its death-wound from aversion, and forgetfulness buries it.
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.
Cannot we all learn something from love, even those of us who may not be professed lovers? The teachers of the new cults, of mental and moral healing, go so far as to say that all they know has been learned through love. The foundation of their philosophy is love, and the inspiration, too. In it they declare there is the only health. In its enemy, hate, they find the only disease, the only cause of death. Surely there are many expressions of love besides the one that has been allowed to usurp the word. The love of the youth for the maiden and of the maiden for the youth is only one form of the love that radiates through the whole world, the sunshine of life from which we all derive our health and our energy.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Love", Reactions and Other Essays Discussing Those States of Feeling and Attitude of Mind That Find Expression In Our Individual Qualities
Love is the most common miracle.
JOHN GREEN
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
The pain of love is how slowly it dies.
K. J. PARKER
Evil for Evil