LOVE QUOTES XL

quotations about love

For, without love, pleasure withers quickly, becomes a foul taste on the palate, and pleasure's inventions are soon exhausted.

JAMES BALDWIN

Just Above My Head

Tags: James Baldwin


Cannot we all learn something from love, even those of us who may not be professed lovers? The teachers of the new cults, of mental and moral healing, go so far as to say that all they know has been learned through love. The foundation of their philosophy is love, and the inspiration, too. In it they declare there is the only health. In its enemy, hate, they find the only disease, the only cause of death. Surely there are many expressions of love besides the one that has been allowed to usurp the word. The love of the youth for the maiden and of the maiden for the youth is only one form of the love that radiates through the whole world, the sunshine of life from which we all derive our health and our energy.

JOHN DANIEL BARRY

"Love", Reactions and Other Essays Discussing Those States of Feeling and Attitude of Mind That Find Expression In Our Individual Qualities


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


True love is a giant cheese wheel.

DAYNA EVANS

"True Love Is a Giant Cheese Wheel", New York Magazine, December 21, 2015


The problem with being passionately in love ... is that it deprives you of too much sleep.

DAN SIMMONS

The Rise of Endymion

Tags: Dan Simmons


So being in love is like being hooked up to a perpetual dopamine drip, and you get a little hit every time you see the person or touch them or think about them?

SEAN ILLING

"This is what love does to your brain", Vox, April 23, 2018


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


Love is an immortal wound that cannot be closed up. A person loses something, a part of her soul, when she loves someone. And she goes about looking for that lost part of her soul, for she knows that otherwise she is incomplete and cannot be at rest. It is only when she is with the person she loves that she becomes complete again in herself; but the moment he leaves, she loses that part which he has taken with him and knows no rest till she has found him once more.

LIN YUTANG

Moment in Peking

Tags: Lin Yutang


Love gratified, is love satisfied -- and love satisfied, is indifference begun.

SAMUEL RICHARDSON

Clarissa

Tags: Samuel Richardson


Happy is love or friendship when returned--
The lovers whose pure flames have equal burned.

BION OF SMYRNA

"Friendship"

Tags: Bion of Smyrna


For me, however, if I understand the concept, to love properly and in earnest one would have to do it anonymously, or at least in an undeclared fashion, so as not to seem to ask anything in return, since asking and getting are the antithesis of love--if, as I say, I have the concept aright, which from all I have said and all that has been said to me so far it appears I do not. It is very puzzling. Love, the kind that I mean, would require a superhuman capacity for sacrifice and self-denial, such as a saint possesses, or a god, and saints are monsters, as we know, and as for the gods--well.

JOHN BANVILLE

The Infinities

Tags: John Banville


Choose to love whomsoever thou wilt: all else will follow.

ST. AUGUSTINE

On the Mystical Body of Christ

Tags: St. Augustine


Ah, my friends, Love, like a froward boy, with his hands full of sugar-plums, still cries for more.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought

Tags: Christian Nestell Bovee


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


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


True Christian love is not derived from things without, but floweth from the heart, as from a spring.

MARTIN LUTHER

Sermon XI, A Selection of the Most Celebrated Sermons of M. Luther and J. Calvin

Tags: Martin Luther


To men of a certain type
The suspicion that they are incapable of loving
Is as disturbing to their self-esteem
As, in cruder men, the fear of impotence.

T. S. ELIOT

The Cocktail Party

Tags: T. S. Eliot


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

Tags: Gelett Burgess


Oh, love. Love is best of all. There is no such total element, not even pain. Who has ever loved, knows this. I need not say more.

TANITH LEE

Mortal Suns


Nothing is so strange when one is in love ... as the complete indifference of other people.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Mrs. Dalloway