quotations about love
Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Kafka on the Shore
Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful molder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State- and Church-begotten weed, marriage?
EMMA GOLDMAN
Anarchism and Other Essays
The weight of love
Has buoyed me up
Till my head
Knocks against the sky.
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
O Magazine, Feb. 2007
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
What amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy--and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.
ANNE ENRIGHT
The Gathering
Man loves most that which is his own.
HENRY ADAMS
Historical Essays
I was thinking what a curious thing love is; only a sentiment, and yet it has power to make fools of men and slaves of women.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
A Long Fatal Love Chase
Love is a king who reigns without laws.
SPANISH PROVERB
To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
Graziella: A Story of Italian Love
Before I met my husband, I'd never fallen in love. I'd stepped in it a few times.
RITA RUDNER
stand-up routine
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
The caresses over which love presides are always pure.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections, as leaves are to the life of trees. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
American Note-Books, Mar. 9, 1853
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
Most people know the sheer wonder that goes with falling in love, how not only does everything in heaven and earth become new, but the lover himself becomes new. It is literally like the sap rising in the tree, putting forth new green shoots of life.
CARYLL HOUSELANDER
The Reed of God
I've found out that falling in love doesn't have anything to do with time. It can take a year or an instant. It happens when it's ready to happen.
NORA ROBERTS
The Calhouns
O, human love! thou spirit given,
On Earth, of all we hope in Heaven!
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"Tamerlane"
The affections are like lightning: you cannot tell where they will strike till they have fallen.
HENRI-DOMINIQUE LACORDAIRE
attributed, A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern
But the most common species of love is that which first arises from beauty, and afterwards diffuses itself into kindness and into the bodily appetite. Kindness or esteem, and the appetite to generation, are too remote to unite easily together. The one is, perhaps, the most refined passion of the soul; the other the most gross and vulgar. The love of beauty is placed in a just medium betwixt them, and partakes of both their natures: From whence it proceeds, that it is so singularly fitted to produce both.
DAVID HUME
"Of the Amorous Passion, or Love Betwixt the Sexes", A Treatise of Human Nature
Well they say that love is in the air, but never is it clear,
How to pull it close and make it stay
Butterflies are free to fly, and so they fly away
And I'm left to carry on and wonder why
SHERYL CROW
"Always on Your Side"