quotations about love
As the gambler said of his dice, to love and win is the best thing, to love and lose is the next best.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERY
Pendennis
You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
November
You might as well make yourself fly as to make yourself love.
MARILYN MONROE
My Story
Sex is the joining of two bodies; love is the joining of two souls.
GARY D. CHAPMAN
Making Love
Gary Demonte Chapman (born January 10, 1938) is an American author, radio talk show host, and the senior associate pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He is most noted for his book The Five Love Languages, which outlines five general ways that romantic partners express and experience love.
It is not in craving after ready-made, complete and finished things that love finds its meaning -- but in the urge to participate in the becoming of such things.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds
We should like those whom we love to receive all their happiness, or, if this were impossible, all their unhappiness from our hands.
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.
Only love heals. Anger, guilt, and fear can only destroy.
ALYSON NOEL
Evermore
To love and to live well is wished of many, but incident to few.
JOHN LYLY
Euphues and His England
Only love makes fruitful the soul.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
Beyond
The prerequisite to loving others is to love yourself. If you don't have a healthy respect for who you are, and if you don't learn to accept yourself faults and all, you will never be able to properly love other people.
JOEL OSTEEN
Become a Better You
It isn't enough to love people because they're good to you, or because in some way or other you're going to get something by it. We have to love because we love loving.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
A Bit O' Love
No distance can keep anxious lovers long asunder.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, Sep. 30, 1779
Love seems to survive life, and to reach beyond it. I think we take it with us past the grave. Do we not still give it to those who have left us? May we not hope that they feel it for us, and that we shall leave it here in one or two fond bosoms, when we also are gone?
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The Virginians
The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.
SYLVIA PLATH
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself--on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Second Sex
Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore.
NEIL GAIMAN
The Sandman, #65
Neil Gaiman (born 10 November 1960) is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, films, and nonfiction. He is best known for the comic book series The Sandman and novels such as American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book.
If a man can be properly said to love something, it must be clear that he feels affection for it as a whole, and does not love part of it to the exclusion of the rest.
PLATO
The Republic
I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don't want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that's the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.
KURT VONNEGUT
The Paris Review, spring 1977
Love is a powerful neurological condition like hunger or thirst, only more permanent. We talk about love being blind or unconditional, in the sense that we have no control over it. But then, that is not so surprising, since love is basically chemistry.
JIM AL-KHALILI
"What is love -- can it really be defined and explained?", The Guardian, February 12, 2016
Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.
JOHN DONNE
The Anagram