quotations about love
This love of ours, in so far as it is a love for one particular creature, is not perhaps a very real thing, since, though associations of pleasant or painful musings can attach it for a time to a woman to the extent of making us believe that it has been inspired by her in a logically necessary way, if on the other hand we detach ourselves deliberately or unconsciously from those associations, this love, as though it were in fact spontaneous and sprang from ourselves alone, will revive in order to bestow itself on another woman.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
To find love round your ways,
A shield in evil days;
A robe that keeps you warm,
As ermine, from the storm;
To wear it as a jewel-flame,
A cross of honor, with a royal name;
To sit a queen, unmoved
By want or grief--this is to be beloved.
CAROLINE SPENCER
"The Difference"
We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.
MAYA ANGELOU
A Brave and Startling Truth
What is the science at work behind falling out of love? How does the skin of a person you made love to once start feeling strange even to touch? How do feelings that you once invested your every living breath in while expressing just get reduced to mere memories of words? How does the joy of a heart overflowing with love suddenly transforms into an empty cauldron with echoes of pain? Is love a mirage?
AMIT MEHRA
"As I Watch a Love End I Realize, Love is Always a Stowaway", The Good Men Project, March 14, 2016
Whatever our religious practice, love has no religion. On the contrary love is a religion of its own.
SANJAY LEELA BHANSALI
"Bajirao Mastani is a tribute to Mughal-e-Azam: Sanjay Leela Bhansali", Firstpost, December 22, 2015
When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate.
JOHN BERGER
Ways of Seeing
When you love someone
you have to let them go.
It's the only way to keep them.
MACRINA WIEDERKEHR
Seasons of Your Heart
It's love that makes the world go round!
W. S. GILBERT
Iolanthe
Love is clockworks
And cold steel
Fingers too numb to feel
Squeeze the handle
Blow out the candle
Love is blindness
U2
"Love Is Blindness", Achtung Baby
Love lives in palaces as well as in thatched huts.
JAPANESE PROVERB
Love's a fire that needs renewal
Of fresh beauty for its fuel.
THOMAS CAMPBELL
Freedom and Love
Marriage--what an abomination! Love--yes, but not marriage. Love cannot exist in marriage, because love is an ideal; that is to say, something not quite understood--transparencies, colour, light, a sense of the unreal. But a wife--you know all about her--who her father was, who her mother was, what she thinks of you and her opinion of the neighbours over the way. Where, then, is the dream, the au dela? There is none. I say in marriage an au dela is impossible ... the endless duet of the marble and the water, the enervation of burning odours, the baptismal whiteness of women, light, ideal tissues, eyes strangely dark with kohl, names that evoke palm trees and ruins, Spanish moonlight or maybe Persepolis. The monosyllable which epitomizes the ennui and the prose of our lives is heard not, thought not there--only the nightingale-harmony of an eternal yes. Freedom limitless; the Mahometan stands on the verge of the abyss, and the spaces of perfume and colour extend and invite him with the whisper of a sweet unending yes. The unknown, the unreal ... Thus love is possible, there is a delusion, an au dela.
GEORGE MOORE
Confessions of a Young Man
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
Those who are gone, you have. Those who departed loving you, love you still; and you love them always. They are not really gone, those dear hearts and true; they are only gone into the next room; and you will presently get up and follow them, and yonder door will close upon you, and you will be no more seen.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Roundabout Papers
Love is blind, but not the neighbors.
MEXICAN PROVERB
Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Written on the Body