quotations about love
Some things you can feel coming. You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. When you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.
UMBERTO ECO
Foucault's Pendulum
With the secularization of the Western world, we are turning to romantic love to give us what we once looked for in the realm of the divine. Transcendence, meaning, wholeness, and ecstasy.
ESTHER PEREL
"A top couples' therapist says our 'religion of romantic love' is making relationships harder", Business Insider, November 10, 2017
We outgrow love like other things
And put it in the drawer,
Till it an antique fashion shows
Like costumes grandsires wore.
EMILY DICKINSON
"We Outgrow Love Like Other Things"
When people say, "God is love," I think they mean that love is extremely important, or that God really wants us to love. But in Christian conception, God really has love as his essence.
TIMOTHY KELLER
The Reason for God
Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others. As long as its spell lasts, the only in-between which can insert itself between two lovers is the child, love's own product. The child, this in-between, to which the lovers now are related and which they hold in common, is representative of the world in that it also separates them; it is an indication that they will insert a new world into the existing world. Through the child, it is as though the lovers return to the world from which their love had expelled them. But this new worldliness, the possible result and the only possibly happy ending of a love affair, is, in a sense, the end of love, which must either overcome the partners anew or be transformed into another mode of belonging together.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Human Condition
Love is not some mushy feeling for your parents that you are born with, or a romanticized sexuality you learn from magazines. It is action. If you know what love is you can never be in doubt about whether someone loves you or you love someone.
PETER ABRAHAMS
The Fury of Rachel Monette
O, human love! thou spirit given,
On Earth, of all we hope in Heaven!
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"Tamerlane"
Love is... carefully curated ignorance.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016
The poorest lives some little blossoms bring
To deck Love's altar in the days of spring.
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex.
JULIAN BARNES
Talking It Over
The weight of love
Has buoyed me up
Till my head
Knocks against the sky.
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
O Magazine, Feb. 2007
Love kills.
EDNA BUCHANAN
Love Kills
Love is in the fresh bottle of cold water that magically appears by your bedside lamp every night, because he knows you get thirsty when you get up to nurse the baby every two hours.
RASHA RUSHDY
"Love Is Sweatpants and Take-out, Actually", Huffington Post, February 14, 2016
Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.
ELLEN KEY
"The Morality of Woman"
If you believe yourself unfortunate, because you have "loved and lost," perish the thought. One who has loved truly, can never lose entirely. Love is whimsical and temperamental. Its nature is ephemeral, and transitory. It comes when it pleases, and goes away without warning. Accept and enjoy it while it remains, but spend no time worrying about its departure. Worry will never bring it back.
NAPOLEON HILL
Think and Grow Rich
If one loves, one need not have an ideology of love.
BRUCE LEE
The Warrior Within: The Philosophies of Bruce Lee
At the beginning of a relationship we love with 100 percent of our heart. However, once we are hurt, we think that if we only love with 50 percent of our heart, it will not get hurt as much the next time around. But we end up getting hurt just as much. We have to give our relationship our full attention. We should not be afraid of love.
ANDREA BRISENO
"True love is built from broken pieces", The Rampage Online, March 28, 2016
Free-market free love is simultaneously a utopian idea and a dystopian idea. The idea of total sexual freedom is an ideal, but then it's also a Michel Houellebecq nightmare. Now online dating and apps have made that normal. Everyone is "on the market" or "off the market"; friends with "benefits," "investing" time--these are all economic metaphors.
MOIRA WEIGEL
"Love in a Time of Capital: An Interview With Moira Weigel", The Nation, August 29, 2016
Love clamors far more incessantly and passionately at a closed gate than an open one!
MARIE CORELLI
The Master Christian
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Human Condition