quotations about love
If you love someone but rarely make yourself available to him or her, that is not true love.
THICH NHAT HANH
Living Buddha, Living Christ
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Letters to a Young Poet
To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.
WOODY ALLEN
Love and Death
We all crave love. Its universal language unites us as humans. Yet, it also slays us. If you gave people a choice between heartbreak and the Zika virus, we'd all be feverish in bed. Love's pain spreads across our flesh faster than any plague. As soon as you think you're cured, you relapse.
HEIDI K. ISERN
"The responsibility to fall out of love is on you", Quartz, August 5, 2016
Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Lady Oracle
Margaret Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. Her works encompass a variety of themes including gender and identity, religion and myth, the power of language, climate change, and "power politics".
On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself--on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Second Sex
Like thunder needs rain
Like a preacher needs pain
Like tongues of flame
Like a sweet stain
Need your love
I need your love
U2
"Hawkmoon 269", Rattle and Hum
When love is reached through suffering ... it has a power it can never gain through innocence.
ANNE RICE
Memnoch the Devil
True love is like a coin, changeless and pure,
Bright from the mint of virtuous affection,
Whose solid worth lies in its gold secure
Stamped with the soul's reflection;
Though Time may mar with rude and hasty hands
Its brilliancy and beauty,
Its gold unspoiled beneath the surface stands
Alloyed with common duty.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"Love's Counterfeits"
It is much easier to tell a woman you love her when you do not than when you do.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke
Every little thing wants to be loved.
SUE MONK KIDD
The Secret Life of Bees
In this day and age, love is temporary and marriage is unnatural--the product of Madison Avenue advertising executives and television producers.
MICHAEL PALMER
The Fifth Vial
Love does nothing but make you weak! It turns you into an object of pity and derision--a mewling pathetic creature no more fit to live than a worm squirming on the pavement after a hard summer rain.
TERESA MEDEIROS
The Vampire Who Loved Me
Some meet love's dreams when kissed by death,
And some again in youth,
But all have felt the quickening breath
Of love's undying truth.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"Love's Dreams"
Edwin Leibfreed published several books of poetry, including A Garland of Verse (1910), A Soliloquy of Life (1915), and The Man of a Thousand Loves (1932).
Love will have its day.
U2
"North and South of the River", Staring at the Sun
Among the blessings of love there is hardly one more exquisite than the sense that in uniting the beloved life to ours we can watch over its happiness, bring comfort where hardship was, and over memories of privation and suffering open the sweetest fountains of joy.
GEORGE ELIOT
Daniel Deronda
We do not say of Love that he is myopic. We do not say of Love that he is astigmatic. We say quite simply, Love is blind. We might go further and say, Love is deaf. That would be a profound and obvious truth. We might go further still and say, Love is dumb. But that would be a profound and obvious lie. For love is always an extraordinarily fluent talker.
MAX BEERBOHM
A Christmas Garland
It is not in craving after ready-made, complete and finished things that love finds its meaning -- but in the urge to participate in the becoming of such things.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds
Some people, right away, do know each other deeply. Love gives them insight into each other. Love makes them pledge themselves to each other. Love makes them inventive. Yes, it also makes them ridiculous. But that's just another of love's glories. It makes being ridiculous permissible.
JAMES KUZNER
"Should we scoff at the idea of love at first sight?", The Conversation, August 30, 2018
James Kuzner is Associate Professor of English at Brown University. With a specialty in early modern literature, his research tends to focus on the relationship between literature, selfhood, and political imagination.
It's easier to avoid the snares of love than to escape once you are in that net.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura