quotations about love
Viewed from the supposed heights of reason, someone else's great love looks rather ordinary.
MINA SAMUELS
"Truly, Madly, Deeply--A Fable Explains Why Love is Crazy", Huffington Post, October 31, 2017
Love is but a fire that is to be transmitted.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Psychoanalysis of Fire
The first love disappears, but never goes. That ache becomes reconciliation.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
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
Love is no hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed; but, flower or weed, whose scent and colour are always wild!
JOHN GALSWORTHY
The Forsyte Saga
Love ... must come suddenly, with great thunderclaps and bolts of lightning -- a hurricane from heaven that drops down on your life, overturns it, tears away your will like a leaf, and carries your whole heart off with it into the abyss.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
Love covers a multitude of sins.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
Perhaps love's greatest gift--that it is indeed unconditional--is also its greatest curse.
KRISTIN ARMSTRONG
O Magazine, Feb. 2007
It is certain there is no other passion which does produce such contrary effects in so great a degree. But this may be said for love, that if you strike it out of the soul, life would be insipid, and our being but half animated. Human nature would sink into deadness and lethargy, if not quickened with some active principle; and as for all others, whether ambition, envy, or avarice, which are apt to possess the mind in the absence of this passion, it must be allowed that they have greater pains, without the compensation of such exquisite pleasures as those we find in love.
JOSEPH ADDISON
"The Passion of Love", Essays Moral and Humorous
It was always about love. Always, always about love. Lost love, love denied, the obsessive hunger for love. Parental or romantic. Whether it was twisted or pure, fulfilled or unrequited, love was always at the source.
JAMES W. HALL
Magic City
For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.
GEORGE ELIOT
Daniel Deronda
If you love someone, then your freedom is curtailed. If you love someone, you give up much of your privacy. If you love someone, then you are no longer merely one person but half of a couple. To think or behave any other way is to risk losing that love.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Obsidian Butterfly
Upon the roadway of my life,
A guide-board I will leave of love,
So those who follow in my steps
May guided be to hills above.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Love's Guide-Board"
To love is to will the good of the other.
THOMAS AQUINAS
Summa Theologica
When we hear complaints of the wretchedness or vanity of human life, the proper answer to them would be that there is hardly any one who at some point or other has not been in love. If we consider the high abstraction of this feeling, its depth, its purity, its voluptuous refinement, even in the meanest breast, how sacred and how sweet it is, this alone may reconcile us to the lot of humanity. That drop of balm turns the bitter cup to a delicious nectar.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
There is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love.
IVAN KLIMA
Love and Garbage
A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.
AMY HEMPEL
"The Dog of the Marriage"
To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I.'
AYN RAND
The Fountainhead
Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Love laughs at locksmiths.
ENGLISH PROVERB