quotations about love
Love is to be the lodestar of our lives and, if blessed with the capacity to exercise it, we can aspire to imitate God.
SIMON MAY
Love: A History
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
JOHN DONNE
The Sun Rising
Our earthly loves are but so many silver steps leading us up to the great golden love of God.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Son, if a maiden love thee, thou shalt appear handsome in her sight; she shall praise thine eyes, and the corners of thy mouth, yea, she shall admire thy hands. Though thou wert even as the orangutan yet shall she paint thee with fancies.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
Sure, love vincit omnia; is immeasurably above all ambition, more precious than wealth, more noble than name. He knows not life who knows not that: he hath not felt the highest faculty of the soul who hath not enjoyed it.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
The kind of love my mum talks about is full of worry and work and forgiving people and putting up with things and stuff like that. It's not a lot of fun, that's for sure. If that really is love, the kind my mum talks about, then nobody can ever know if they love somebody, can they? It seems like what she's saying is, if you're pretty sure you love somebody, the way I was sure in those few weeks, then you can't love them, because that isn't what love is. Trying to understand what she means by love would do your head in.
NICK HORNBY
Slam
The world gets grimy and the love object is in stark relief from it's surroundings. This is love, a pretty thing on an ugly street.
DANIEL HANDLER
Adverbs
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
This love is a lichen....
etching on the unmoved rock
the only rune it knows.
SARAH LINDSAY
"Stubbornly", Twigs and Knucklebones
Those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
To show great love for God and our neighbor we need not do great things. It is how much love we put in the doing that makes our offering Something Beautiful for God.
MOTHER TERESA
A Gift for God
True love survives all shocks: an affection originally produced by admiration for unusual beauty may not only survive the loss of that beauty, but may become more intense if the beauty has changed into ugliness through causes that bind the lovers together in tender associations.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
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
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
With whom shall a young lady fall in love but with the person she sees? She is not supposed to lose her heart in a dream, like a Princess in the "Arabian Nights;" or to plight her young affections to the portrait of a gentleman in the Exhibition, or a sketch in the "Illustrated London News." You have an instinct within you which inclines you to attach yourself to some one: you meet Somebody: you hear Somebody constantly praised; you walk, or ride, or waltz, or talk, or sit in the same pew at church with Somebody: you meet again, and again, and--"Marriages are made in Heaven," your dear mamma says, pinning your orange-flower wreath on, with her blessed eyes dimmed with tears--and there is a wedding breakfast, and you take off your white satin and retire to your coach-and-four, and you and he are a happy pair--Or, the affair is broken off and then, poor dear wounded heart! Why then you meet Somebody Else, and twine your young affections round number two. It is your nature so to do. Do you suppose it is all for the man's sake that you love, and not a bit for your own? Do you suppose you would drink if you were not thirsty, or eat if you were not hungry?
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Pendennis
A lover is like a firefly,
lighting your life for a moment,
then leaving you to deal with the darkness
Until it flashes again.
RICH REITH
"Soulmate"
Ah! let us love, my Love, for Time is heartless,
Be happy while you may!
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
"The Lake"
And love is part and union in itself
Of all that is in nature, brilliant, pure--
Of all in feeling, sacred and sublime.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Festus
Danger and anger are everywhere. Love is the rarity, the gem buried in the core of the mine, the outpost of God.
TANITH LEE
Metallic Love