quotations about love
Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it.
WOODY ALLEN
A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
Love was a country he knew nothing about.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
The feeling of love is a rich feeling, but the expression of love in word or deed is a joy.
ALEXANDER LOWEN
Depression and the Body
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
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
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
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
Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Marriage and Morals
In love, we are best pleased when we please others.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Love--what a volume in a word, an ocean in a tear,
A seventh heaven in a glance, a whirlwind in a sigh,
The lightning in a touch, a millennium in a moment,
What concentrated joy or woe in blest or blighted love!
For it is that native poetry springing up indigenous to Mind,
The heart's own-country music thrilling all its chords,
The story without an end that angels throng to hear,
The word, the king of words, carved on Jehovah's heart!
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
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
Call us what you will, we are made such by love.
JOHN DONNE
The Canonization
Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marring the whole girl.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
attributed, The Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations
Burning with tender love is not really an image for someone who has warmed mercury over a gentle flame. In slowness, gentleness, and hope we have the hidden force of moral perfection and of material transmutation.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Formation of the Scientific Mind
Even kindergarten love is hard work.
JEFF HICKS
"Kindergarten love flourishes, 50 years later", The Record, September 3, 2018
Love is the cheapest of religions.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, Dec. 21, 1939
There is no passion that more excites us to every thing that is noble and generous than virtuous Love.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
If the thing loved is base, the lover becomes base.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Love needs its martyrs
Needs its sacrifices
They live for your beauty
And pay for their vices
Love will be the death of
My lonely soul brothers
But their spirits shall live on in
The hearts of all lovers
DEPECHE MODE
"The Love Thieves", Ultra