quotations about love
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
The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.
ANITA BROOKNER
A Friend from England
Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists.
ANITA BROOKNER
attributed, Women Writers Talk
To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I.'
AYN RAND
The Fountainhead
First we love within, then we love the world.
ELIZABETH LESSER
The Seeker's Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure
We love instinctively, but we love well because we've learned how.
BOB LONSBERRY
A Various Language
Oh, ill betide that villain love, not love,
That all its object and affection finds
In the mere contact of encircling arms!
PEDRO CALDERON DE LA BARCA
The Painter of His Own Dishonour
I used to be all about the grand gestures. The big demonstrations of love. The utterly romantic, perfectly crafted moments that take your breath away. It's funny though, because after almost ten years, and two kids, later, I've come to see love and romance in a whole different light. And I can honestly say that this year, for the first time, I've made peace with the fact that we aren't buying each other the obligatory chocolates or flowers. I'm actually okay with it. I promise. Husband dearest, in case you're wondering if this is a trap, it isn't.
RASHA RUSHDY
"Love Is Sweatpants and Take-out, Actually", Huffington Post, February 14, 2016
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
Love is the rule of rules, the key to all mysteries.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills: to know that high initiation, she must often tread where it is hard to tread, and feel the chill air, and watch through darkness. It is not true that love makes things easy: it makes us choose what is difficult.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
If the thing loved is base, the lover becomes base.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Perhaps love's greatest gift--that it is indeed unconditional--is also its greatest curse.
KRISTIN ARMSTRONG
O Magazine, Feb. 2007
So soon as this want or power [of love] is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"On Love", Essays and Letters
Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Marriage and Morals
Once you love someone it's like cancer. It spreads and spreads until it eats you up.
ANN WUEHLER
Interviews With Loneliness
Call us what you will, we are made such by love.
JOHN DONNE
The Canonization
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
When people fall in love they not only change themselves, but in their eyes the whole world changes. They may have been commonplace or dull before. But once in love they take on a strange brightness. And however uninteresting and dreary the world may have seemed to them, it at once becomes a fairyland.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Love", Reactions and Other Essays Discussing Those States of Feeling and Attitude of Mind That Find Expression In Our Individual Qualities
Love and money should properly have nothing to do with each other.
JOHN SAUL
Guardian