LOVE QUOTES L

quotations about love

Love rays us round as glory swathes a star,
And, from the mystic touch of lips and palms,
Streams rosy warmth!

GERALD MASSEY

"To My Wife"

Tags: Gerald Massey


Love's a dog in a manger.

D. H. LAWRENCE

Sons and Lovers

David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 - 2 March 1930) was an English writer and poet. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection on the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization. His opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage".


Never seek to tell thy love
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind does move
Silently, invisibly.

WILLIAM BLAKE

Poems from Blake's Notebook


Oh! For love, for the painfully nourished, tenderly cherished, sweet frenzies illusion, the known-illusion within the globule of sentimental cynicism. For romantic love, then, I sacrifice honor, decency, human kindness, charity, honesty, friendship and the future -- all, (ah!) for love!

EDWARD ABBEY

The Serpents of Paradise

Tags: Edward Abbey


Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.

ANNE CARSON

Eros the Bittersweet

Tags: Anne Carson


The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings.

PLATO

Phaedrus

Tags: Plato


The only way to experience love is to buy it and have it installed in your head. But, like most technology, its shelf-life is limited.

GERMAIN LUSSIER

"Love Is a Gadget in This Upcoming Scott Eastwood Film", Gizmodo, August 15, 2016


There is not on earth so base a knave as the man who wins the love of a woman when he knows that he cannot or ought not to requite it.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit


They do best, who if they cannot but admit love, yet make it keep quarters; and sever it wholly from their serious affairs, and actions, of life; for if it check once with business, it troubleth men's fortunes, and maketh men, that they can no ways be true to their own ends.

SIR FRANCIS BACON

"Of Love", Essays, or Counsels Civil and Moral

Tags: Francis Bacon


Those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.

CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON

The Shadow of the Wind

Tags: Carlos Ruiz Zafon


Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Mon Coeur Mis a Nu

Tags: Charles Baudelaire


Until Obi met Clara on board the cargo boat Sasa he had thought of love as another grossly over-rated European invention.

CHINUA ACHEBE

No Longer at Ease

Tags: Chinua Achebe


We perceive when love begins and when it declines by our perplexity when alone.

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.


What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I'm talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That's the size of it, the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's not containable.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

The Powerbook


What could be more serious than the love of man for woman, what more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers, these people entering into illusion glittering eyed, must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

To the Lighthouse

Tags: Virginia Woolf


When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able together to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.

MARCEL PROUST

Within a Budding Grove

Tags: Marcel Proust


When we consider the lofty character of love, and remember his wonderful helpfulness to man, it would seem that he could have no opposition in his work, nor enemies under the sun; yet there is a whole bunch of fellows who are constantly antagonizing love. Among them are anger, hatred, revenge, envy, and jealousy. Love will have no fellowship with these, and if any one of them is admitted into the heart love goes out.

NICIAS BALLARD COOKSEY

Helps to Happiness


When you get in love you are made all over again. The person who loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass. So there are two you's, the one you create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't be any difference between the two you's or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment.

ROBERT PENN WARREN

Four Quarters, 1970

Tags: Robert Penn Warren


All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Other Wind

Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929 - January 22, 2018) was an American author best known for her works of speculative fiction. Her literary career spanned nearly sixty years, yielding more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children's books.


Constancy in love ... is only inconstancy confined to one object.

FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

Moral Maxims