quotations about love
It isn't being happy together ... that makes one love--it's being unhappy together.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Ministry of Fear
Two such as you with such a master speed
Cannot be parted nor be swept away
From one another once you are agreed
That life is only life forevermore
Together wing to wing and oar to oar.
ROBERT FROST
The Master Speed
Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
The Looking Glass War
Love cannot in its very nature be peaceful or content. It is a restlessness, an unsatisfaction. I can grant a lasting love just as I can grant a lasting unsatisfaction; but the lasting love cannot be coupled with possession, for love is pain and desire and possession is easement and fulfilment.
JACK LONDON
The Kempton-Wace Letters
Never marry but for love; but see that thou lov'st what is lovely.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
Love is blind; couch not his eyes.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
Ranthorpe
Heav'nly love shall outdo Hellish hate.
JOHN MILTON
Paradise Lost
When we fall in love, we hope--both egotistically and altruistically--that we shall be finally, truly seen: judged and approved. Of course, love does not always bring approval: being seen may just as well lead to a thumbs-down and a season in hell.
JULIAN BARNES
Nothing to Be Frightened Of
I'd call it love if love didn't take so many years but lust too is a jewel.
ADRIENNE RICH
Necessities of Life
When [men] see a pretty woman, and feel the delicious madness of love coming over them, they always stop to calculate her temper, her money, their own money, or suitableness for the married life.... Ha, ha, ha! Let us fool in this way no more. I have been in love forty-three times with all ranks and conditions of women, and would have married every time if they would have let me. How many wives had King Solomon, the wisest of men? And is not that story a warning to us that Love is master of the wisest? It is only fools who defy him.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Men's Wives
In love, we are best pleased when we please others.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
Though this faith in love as the one democratic, even universal, form of salvation open to us moderns is the result of a long religious history that saw divine love as the origin of human love and as the model to be imitated, it has paradoxically come into its own because of a decline in religious faith. It has been possible only because, since the end of the eighteenth century, love has increasingly filled the vacuum left by the retreat of Christianity.
SIMON MAY
Love: A History
Love covers a multitude of sins.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
He gives a ripe apple for an apple-blossom that changes an old love for a new.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
Love is a sickness full of woes,
All remedies refusing:
A plant that with most cutting grows,
Most barren with best using.
SAMUEL DANIEL
Hymen's Triumph
There's always a side of folly with any serving of love. And isn't that what makes it so delicious?
MINA SAMUELS
"Truly, Madly, Deeply--A Fable Explains Why Love is Crazy", Huffington Post, October 31, 2017
One of the remarkable things about love is that, despite very irritating people writing poems and songs about how pleasant it is, it really is quite pleasant.
DANIEL HANDLER
as Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
Falling in Love, as modern biology teaches us to believe, is nothing more than the latest, highest, and most involved exemplification, in the human race, of that almost universal selective process which Mr. Darwin has enabled us to recognise throughout the whole long series of the animal kingdom. The butterfly that circles and eddies in his aerial dance around his observant mate is endeavouring to charm her by the delicacy of his colouring, and to overcome her coyness by the display of his skill. The peacock that struts about in imperial pride under the eyes of his attentive hens, is really contributing to the future beauty and strength of his race by collecting to himself a harem through whom he hands down to posterity the valuable qualities which have gained the admiration of his mates in his own person. Mr. Wallace has shown that to be beautiful is to be efficient; and sexual selection is thus, as it were, a mere lateral form of natural selection--a survival of the fittest in the guise of mutual attractiveness and mutual adaptability, producing on the average a maximum of the best properties of the race in the resulting offspring. I need not dwell here upon this aspect of the case, because it is one with which, since the publication of the 'Descent of Man,' all the world has been sufficiently familiar.
GRANT ALLEN
"Falling in Love", Falling in Love and Other Essays
So soon as this want or power [of love] is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"On Love", Essays and Letters