quotations about love
Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.
ANNE CARSON
The Beauty of the Husband
Love isn't something we can just turn off like a well-oiled faucet. It drips, keeping us up at night.
HEIDI K. ISERN
"The responsibility to fall out of love is on you", Quartz, August 5, 2016
Please do not think for a second, as some people do, that Love is primarily an affair of the emotions. It is not: it never ought to be. It is an affair of the will: it is an act of choice.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
Spiritual Letters of Monsignor R. Hugh Benson to One of His Converts
We don't believe in rheumatism and true love until after the first attack.
MARIE VON EBNER-ESCHENBACH
Aphorisms
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (September 13, 1830 - March 12, 1916) was an Austrian writer noted for her excellent psychological novels. She portrayed life among both the poor and the aristocratic.
Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing there trembling? Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is its beauty.... People with no imagination feed it with sex -- the clown of love. They don't know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that -- softly, without props.
TONI MORRISON
Love
True love is a durable fire,
In the mind ever burning.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
As Ye Came from the Holy Land
Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1552 - 1618) was an English writer, poet, soldier, politician, courtier, spy, and explorer. He is also well known for popularizing tobacco in England.
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
Love is the wild card of existence.
RITA MAE BROWN
In Her Day
Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.
BIBLE
John 15:13
Mother love is the most powerful, the most irrational force on earth, even more powerful than sexual love. However, one does lead to the other, so best not to spurn the former.
RITA MAE BROWN
Full Cry
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
Love will sacrifice more to others than friendship, but then it exacts more from them.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
Love, amid the other graces of this world, is like a cathedral tower, which begins at the earth and at the first is surrounded by the other parts of the structure. But at length, rising above buttresses, wall and arch, and parapet and pinnacle, it shoots, spire-like, many a foot right into the air, so high that the huge cross on its summit glows like a spark in the morning light, and shines like a star in the evening sky, when the rest of the pile is enveloped in darkness. So love here is surrounded by the other graces, and divides the honors with them; but they will have felt the wrap of night and of darkness, when it will shine, luminous, against the sky of eternity.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
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
Among all methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as this gust of feverish agitation that sweeps over us from time to time. For then the die is cast, the person whose company we enjoy at that moment is the person we shall henceforward love. It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when -- in this moment of deprivation -- the quest is for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage -- the insensate, agonizing need to possess exclusively.
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Passion
Love, slow and gradual in its growth, is too much like friendship ever to be a violent passion.
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.
Love ain't nothing but a monster with two heads.
COLEMAN HELL
"2 Heads"
Love--that divine fire which was made to light and warm the temple of home--sometimes burns at unholy altars.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
Love will have its day.
U2
"North and South of the River", Staring at the Sun