quotations about love
We've got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant.... You've got to keep watering it. You've got to really look after it and nurture it.
JOHN LENNON
ATV interview, Dec. 2, 1969
Love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.
HERMANN HESSE
Peter Camenzind
Love is the kiss
in the quiet nest
while the leaves are trembling,
mirrored in the water.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
The Butterfly's Evil Spell
Love means not ever having to say you're sorry.
ERICH SEGAL
Love Story
It is much easier to tell a woman you love her when you do not than when you do.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke
Sexual ecstasy usually arises among dyads, or groups of two, but the ritual ecstasy of "primitives" emerged within groups generally composed of thirty or more participants. Thanks to psychology and the psychological concerns of Western culture generally, we have a rich language for describing the emotions drawing one person to another--from the most fleeting sexual attraction, to ego-dissolving love, all the way to the destructive force of obsession. What we lack is any way of describing and understanding the "love" that may exist among dozens of people at a time; and it is this kind of love that is expressed in ecstatic ritual.
BARBARA EHRENREICH
Dancing in the Streets
Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
ANNE CARSON
The Beauty of the Husband
Like thunder needs rain
Like a preacher needs pain
Like tongues of flame
Like a sweet stain
Need your love
I need your love
U2
"Hawkmoon 269", Rattle and Hum
True love always brings joy to ourselves and to the one we love. If our love does not bring joy to both of us, it is not true love.
THICH NHAT HANH
Teachings on Love
On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself--on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Second Sex
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Letters to a Young Poet
It's easier to avoid the snares of love than to escape once you are in that net.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
Running like a river trying to find the ocean
Flowers in the concrete
Climbing over fences, blooming in the shadows
Places that you can't see
Coming through the melody when the night bird sings
Love is a wild thing, yeah
KACEY MUSGRAVES
"Love Is a Wild Thing"
To love and to live well is wished of many, but incident to few.
JOHN LYLY
Euphues and His England
Pains of love be sweeter far
Than all other pleasures are.
JOHN DRYDEN
Tyrannic Love
I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Passion
Love, amid the other graces of this world, is like a cathedral tower, which begins at the earth and at the first is surrounded by the other parts of the structure. But at length, rising above buttresses, wall and arch, and parapet and pinnacle, it shoots, spire-like, many a foot right into the air, so high that the huge cross on its summit glows like a spark in the morning light, and shines like a star in the evening sky, when the rest of the pile is enveloped in darkness. So love here is surrounded by the other graces, and divides the honors with them; but they will have felt the wrap of night and of darkness, when it will shine, luminous, against the sky of eternity.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Love isn't something we can just turn off like a well-oiled faucet. It drips, keeping us up at night.
HEIDI K. ISERN
"The responsibility to fall out of love is on you", Quartz, August 5, 2016
I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
Why does a man who is truly in love insist that this relationship must continue and be "lifelong"? Because life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. Who would want to wake up halfway through an operation?
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, Jan. 19, 1938