quotations about love
There's love, sweet love, for one and all--
For love is best for great and small.
MAUD LINDSAY
"Inside the Garden Gate", Mother Stories
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
Though she had been besieged, courted, and pursued by men who had fallen in love with her, she did not in her heart believe in the existence of love. It seemed to her as unreal as the painted drop scenes, the temples of love, and the banks of roses that formed the settings for her dances. But though she was cold and insensitive to love, she was esteemed a wonderful mistress. She herself practiced love as a duty imposed by her profession, a part to be played that might sometimes please but always fatigued her and called for a high degree of art.
VICKI BAUM
Grand Hotel
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
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
Love is kind of like a unicorn -- elusive and very hard to explain.
OLIVIA TRUFFAUT-WONG
"11 Movies To Watch When You're In Love To Get You Through The Good, The Bad, & All The Feels", Bustle, December 2015
Love was a country he knew nothing about.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.
ANITA BROOKNER
A Friend from England
The imagination of a eunuch dwells more and longer upon the material of love than that of man or woman ... supplying, so far as he can, by speculation, the place of pleasures he can no longer enjoy.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
journal, Apr. 4, 1831
A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.
AMY HEMPEL
"The Dog of the Marriage"
Love is a stream that will find its course.
JAMAICAN PROVERB
Love enters a man through his eyes, a woman through her ears.
POLISH PROVERB
Love begins at home.
GERMAN PROVERB
If the thing loved is base, the lover becomes base.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
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
Love is the sum of all the arts, as it is the reason for their existence.
JACK LONDON
The Valley of the Moon
Love does not seek equals; it creates them.
STENDAHL
The Red and the Black
Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
The Looking Glass War
If love is indeed a mirage then how does it quench real needs like our thirst, satiate our hunger? Are thirst & hunger just a state of mind that can be manipulated, satiated simply by a mirage?
AMIT MEHRA
"As I Watch a Love End I Realize, Love is Always a Stowaway", The Good Men Project, March 14, 2016
Call us what you will, we are made such by love.
JOHN DONNE
The Canonization