quotations about love
The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings.
PLATO
Phaedrus
I say love, and the world populates itself with doves.
PABLO NERUDA
"Get Used to Seeing the Shadow Behind Me"
We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.
MAYA ANGELOU
A Brave and Startling Truth
When you love someone
you have to let them go.
It's the only way to keep them.
MACRINA WIEDERKEHR
Seasons of Your Heart
The girlish talk of love and lovers is henceforth stale and commonplace. The cheap jokes of the comic papers on love and its poor counterfeit, flirtation, are a blasphemy. Love-romances and love-poems have lost their charm, so inadequate are they to tell love's true story. She is herself the romance; she is herself the poem.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
Love fattens on smooth words.
KATHARINE HEPBURN
Me: Stories of My Life
The clearer and happier you feel inside, the more joyous and loving your outer world becomes because love attracts love.
JUDY HALL
Love Crystals
I really thought that love would save us all.
JOHN LENNON
attributed, The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 10, 1980
Love does not dominate; it cultivates.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
attributed, Words of Wisdom: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Love ... like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another's heart, or its flame burns low.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
This is love: You stop bothering about the universal, the general, get sucked instead into the local and particular: When will I see her again? What shall we do today? Do you like these shoes? Theory and reflection are delicate old uncles bustled out of the way by the boisterous nephews action and desire. Themes evaporate, only plot remains.
GLEN DUNCAN
The Last Werewolf
Love is ... seeing your bodies become desiccated trees as if battered by many winds.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016
Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Optimism"
Looking back, I should have known better than to accompany Hugh to a love story. Such movies are always a danger, as unlike battling aliens or going undercover to track a serial killer, falling in love is something most adults have actually experienced at some point in their lives. The theme is universal and encourages the viewer to make a number of unhealthy comparisons, ultimately raising the question "Why can't our lives be like that?" It's a box best left unopened, and its avoidance explains the continued popularity of vampire epics and martial-arts extravaganzas.
DAVID SEDARIS
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
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
Oh, God, I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love. I swim in the sky; I float; my body is full of flowers, flowers with fingers giving me acute, acute caresses, sparks, jewels, quivers of joy, dizziness, such dizziness. Music inside of one, drunkenness. Only closing the eyes and remembering, and the hunger, the hunger for more, more, the great hunger, the voracious hunger, and thirst.
ANAIS NIN
diary, May 30, 1934
Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903 - January 14, 1977) was a French-Cuban American diarist, essayist, novelist and writer of short stories and erotica. Nin's most studied works are her diaries or journals, which detail her marriages to Hugh Parker Guiler and Rupert Pole, in addition to her numerous affairs, including those with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and writer Henry Miller.
What is the science at work behind falling out of love? How does the skin of a person you made love to once start feeling strange even to touch? How do feelings that you once invested your every living breath in while expressing just get reduced to mere memories of words? How does the joy of a heart overflowing with love suddenly transforms into an empty cauldron with echoes of pain? Is love a mirage?
AMIT MEHRA
"As I Watch a Love End I Realize, Love is Always a Stowaway", The Good Men Project, March 14, 2016
Those who are gone, you have. Those who departed loving you, love you still; and you love them always. They are not really gone, those dear hearts and true; they are only gone into the next room; and you will presently get up and follow them, and yonder door will close upon you, and you will be no more seen.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Roundabout Papers
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
THOMAS MANN
The Magic Mountain