quotations about love
The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open.
PHILIP ROTH
The Dying Animal
The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
G. K. CHESTERTON
"The Advantages of Having One Leg", On Lying in Bed and Other Essays
Then is Love blest, when from the cup of the body he drinks the wine of the soul.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Salmon of Doubt
There's love, sweet love, for one and all--
For love is best for great and small.
MAUD LINDSAY
"Inside the Garden Gate", Mother Stories
This love is a lichen....
etching on the unmoved rock
the only rune it knows.
SARAH LINDSAY
"Stubbornly", Twigs and Knucklebones
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"The Meeting in a Dream", Other Inquisitions
To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task ... tremendous and foolish and human.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
Towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state -- admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological -- in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that "I" and "you" are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.
SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents
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
True Love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright,
Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light,
Imagination! which from earth and sky,
And from the depths of human phantasy,
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors,
fills The Universe with glorious beams, and kills
Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow
Of its reverberated lightning.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Epipsychidion
We never love with all our heart and all our soul but once, and that is the first time.
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.
What is annoying in love, is that it is a crime in which one cannot do without an accomplice.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Passion
When love grows diseas'd, the best thing we can do is to put it to a violent death; I cannot endure the torture of a ling'ring and consumptive passion.
GEORGE ETHEREGE
The Man of Mode
When they speak of it, this love of theirs, they speak as of a kind of grand mal brought on catastrophically by a bacillus unknown to science but everywhere present in the air about us, like the tuberculosis spore, and to which all but the coldest constitutions are susceptible.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities
Why the pull of sexual attraction to someone who is unfamiliar, whose allure as Horace marked, portends a war with one's self? As we'll consider, the object of sexual desire has a different constitution from the focus of personal love. With sexual love, there is an emphasis upon touch and kinesthesia that alters the whole/part structure of objects. It brings with it a shift in temporality as well as makes the pleasure of repetitive sexual scenarios curiously new and unique.
PETER HADREAS
A Phenomenology of Love and Hate
Love and death were what novels were about.
OAKLEY HALL
Love and War in California
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Their Eyes Were Watching God
The pain of love is how slowly it dies.
K. J. PARKER
Evil for Evil