quotations about love
A man loves with more or less passion according to the number of cords which his pretty mistress binds to his heart.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
There were often times when I wondered if there was anyone out there for me at all. I would have lengthy chats with friends as we lamented about love and life, but my end conclusion would be that I, or anyone for that matter, had to remain hopeful. Whether or not there was someone for me, having a negative mindset about love wasn’t going to help me find love. I had to believe that there is a special someone out there for everyone and it was by being positive and being my best self that I would attract that person, whoever he might be.
CELESTINE CHUA
"How I Found My Soulmate, Part 1: My Journey in Love", Personal Excellence
Love is the only shocking act left on the face of the earth.
SANDRA BERNHARD
attributed, Parted Lips: Lesbian Love Quotes Through the Ages
When love is full grown it has few words, and sometimes it growls them out.
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Old Gorgon Graham
No one can genuinely love the world, which is too large to love entire. To love all the world at once is pretense or dangerous self-delusion. Loving the world is like loving the idea of love, which is perilous because, feeling virtuous about this grand affection, you are freed from the struggles and the duties that come with loving people as individuals.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Hours
Perhaps love's greatest gift--that it is indeed unconditional--is also its greatest curse.
KRISTIN ARMSTRONG
O Magazine, Feb. 2007
A history of listening to Top 40 radio had left me with a ridiculous and clichéd notion of love. I had never entertained the feeling myself but knew that it meant never having to say you're sorry. It was a many-splendored thing. Love was a rose and a hammer. Both blind and all-seeing, it made the world go round.
DAVID SEDARIS
Naked
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
Strangelove
Strange highs and strange lows
Strangelove
That's how my love goes
Strangelove
Will you give it to me
Will you take the pain
I will give to you
Again and again
And will you return it
DEPECHE MODE
"Strangelove", Music for the Masses
Swift doth young Love flee,
And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream.
GEORGE MEREDITH
Modern Love
When [men] see a pretty woman, and feel the delicious madness of love coming over them, they always stop to calculate her temper, her money, their own money, or suitableness for the married life.... Ha, ha, ha! Let us fool in this way no more. I have been in love forty-three times with all ranks and conditions of women, and would have married every time if they would have let me. How many wives had King Solomon, the wisest of men? And is not that story a warning to us that Love is master of the wisest? It is only fools who defy him.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Men's Wives
Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Marriage and Morals
Love can flourish only as long as it is free and spontaneous; it tends to be killed by the thought of duty. To say that it is your duty to love so-and-so is the surest way to cause you to hate him of her.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Marriage and Morals
True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
attributed, Love: Quotes and Passages from the Heart
Though this faith in love as the one democratic, even universal, form of salvation open to us moderns is the result of a long religious history that saw divine love as the origin of human love and as the model to be imitated, it has paradoxically come into its own because of a decline in religious faith. It has been possible only because, since the end of the eighteenth century, love has increasingly filled the vacuum left by the retreat of Christianity.
SIMON MAY
Love: A History
One who possesses such immense power over our existence will inspire awe that easily threatens to overwhelm us, even if we believe he will never abandon or destroy us.... Its grandeur makes us feel both powerful and powerless--not just to possess the loved one--but in our existence itself: the existence which we yearn for love to anchor. To be in a relationship of love is, in other words, always a relationship of fear; indeed, the greater the love the greater the fear.
SIMON MAY
Love: A History
There is no evil angel but Love.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Love's Labour's Lost
William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616) was an English playwright, poet, and actor. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language.
Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in his glowing hands;
Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.
Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.
ALFRED TENNYSON
Locksley Hall
Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
G. K. CHESTERTON
attributed, Life is a Verb
Love receives its death-wound from aversion, and forgetfulness buries it.
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.