quotations about love
Oh! For love, for the painfully nourished, tenderly cherished, sweet frenzies illusion, the known-illusion within the globule of sentimental cynicism. For romantic love, then, I sacrifice honor, decency, human kindness, charity, honesty, friendship and the future -- all, (ah!) for love!
EDWARD ABBEY
The Serpents of Paradise
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
Such as are excited by the gentler influence of Love assume more of affection in their looks, sink their voice into greater softness, and manifest in their gestures greater nobleness of soul.
XENOPHON
The Banquet
The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Fusees
The kind of love my mum talks about is full of worry and work and forgiving people and putting up with things and stuff like that. It's not a lot of fun, that's for sure. If that really is love, the kind my mum talks about, then nobody can ever know if they love somebody, can they? It seems like what she's saying is, if you're pretty sure you love somebody, the way I was sure in those few weeks, then you can't love them, because that isn't what love is. Trying to understand what she means by love would do your head in.
NICK HORNBY
Slam
The plough of Time breaks up our Eden-land,
And tramples down its fruitful flowery prime.
Yet thro' the dust of ages living shoots
O' the old immortal seed start in the furrows;
And, where Love looked on with glorious eye,
These quicken'd germs of everlastingness
Flower lusty, as of old in Paradise!
GERALD MASSEY
"Wooed and Won"
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
To have loved, to have been made happy thus,
What better fate has life in store for us?
ARTHUR SYMONS
"Variations Upon Love"
Until Obi met Clara on board the cargo boat Sasa he had thought of love as another grossly over-rated European invention.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
We must rejoice when love is great, and pardon its excess, for love is the staff of life, and life without love is life in vain.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
We perceive when love begins and when it declines by our perplexity when alone.
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.
What is love? The need of coming out of one's self.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
When there is love in the heart, there are rainbows in the eyes, which cover every black cloud with gorgeous hues.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
When you've lost all your play, guess what love becomes. Work. Work that gets harder every hour.
MARTIN AMIS
House of Meetings
Why the pull of sexual attraction to someone who is unfamiliar, whose allure as Horace marked, portends a war with one's self? As we'll consider, the object of sexual desire has a different constitution from the focus of personal love. With sexual love, there is an emphasis upon touch and kinesthesia that alters the whole/part structure of objects. It brings with it a shift in temporality as well as makes the pleasure of repetitive sexual scenarios curiously new and unique.
PETER HADREAS
A Phenomenology of Love and Hate
You cannot depict love inside a frame of fact. It needs a mist to dissolve in.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
How to Write
Young love-making--that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to--the things whence its subtle interlacings are swung--are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
Ah, when love dies, women lose two and a half inches in height.
M. C. BEATON
Love, Lies and Liquor
All is fair in love and war.
JOHN LYLY
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit