quotations about love
Is it the beloved who evokes love, or the lover who has love to give?
DOUGLAS CARLTON ABRAMS
The Lost Diary of Don Juan
Love is an amazing magnet.
NICHOLSON BAKER
Traveling Sprinkler
Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
One of the cruelest things about a wrong love is that it delights in tangles and hidden ways; that it teaches and practices deceit from its first inception; that its earliest efforts are toward destroying all older and more sacred attachments.
AMELIA E. BARR
A Singer from the Sea
Love is the immortal flow of energy that nourishes, extends and preserves. Its eternal goal is life.
SMILEY BLANTON
Love or Perish
Smiley Blanton (1882-1966) was an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. A patient of Sigmund Freud, his Diary of My Analysis with Freud appeared in 1971. Later in his career, Blanton collaborated with Norman Vincent Peale in establishing the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry. Together, they opened the Religio-Psychiatric Clinic at the Marble Collegiate Church on lower Fifth Avenue, where free assistance was offered to people suffering from emotional disturbances such as anxiety and depression.
Love is blind.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
The Canterbury Tales
Love is such a simple thing when we have only one-and-twenty summers and a sweet girl of seventeen trembles under our glance, as if she were a bud first opening her heart with wondering rapture to the morning. Such young unfurrowed souls roll to meet each other like two velvet peaches that touch softly and are at rest; they mingle as easily as two brooklets that ask for nothing but to entwine themselves and ripple with ever-interlacing curves in the leafiest hiding-places.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
When does love cease? When one begins to love anew.
LAURA ESQUIVEL
The Law of Love
Now on the summit of Love's topmost peak
Kiss we and part; no farther can we go:
And better death than we from high to low
Should dwindle or decline from strong to weak.
We have found all, there is no more to seek;
All have we proved, no more is there to know;
And Time could only tutor us to eke
Out rapture's warmth with custom's afterglow.
We cannot keep at such a height as this;
And even straining souls like ours inhale
But once in life so rarified a bliss.
What if we lingered till love's breath should fail!
Heaven of my Earth! one more celestial kiss,
Then down by separate pathways to the vale.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"Love's Wisdom", Lyrical Poems
Alfred Austin (30 May 1835 - 2 June 1913) was an English poet and journalist who succeeded Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.
Nuptial love maketh mankind; friendly love perfecteth it; but wanton love corrupteth, and embaseth it.
SIR FRANCIS BACON
"Of Love", Essays, or Counsels Civil and Moral
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
JOHN DONNE
The Sun Rising
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Written on the Body
Here is one of the most beautiful effects of love, its confidence not only in the present, but in the future as well. Cynics may declare that it is only the deceitful way nature uses to make human beings perform her will. To such a view all lovers are indifferent. In their confidence they bind themselves to one another, not for a day only, not even for a lifetime, but for eternity.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Love", Reactions and Other Essays Discussing Those States of Feeling and Attitude of Mind That Find Expression In Our Individual Qualities
Love, however doomed, had the capacity to attach buoys to the soul.
ARIANA FRANKLIN
Mistress of the Art of Death
All human love is a faint type of God's;
An echoing note from a harmonious whole;
A feeble spark from an undying flame;
A single drop from an unfathomed sea:
But God's is infinite; it fills the earth
And heaven, and the broad, trackless realms of space.
ALBERT LAIGHTON
"The Love of God"
True love survives all shocks: an affection originally produced by admiration for unusual beauty may not only survive the loss of that beauty, but may become more intense if the beauty has changed into ugliness through causes that bind the lovers together in tender associations.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
Among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is the strongest and most enduring: when passion comes to unite its force to long affection, love is at its spring-tide.
GEORGE ELIOT
Mr. Gilfil's Love Story
Love's language everywhere is known.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Love's Language"
Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need.
TOM ROBBINS
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Tom Robbins (born July 22, 1932) is an American novelist best known for his novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which was made into a movie in 1993 starring Uma Thurman, Lorraine Bracco, and Keanu Reeves.
There is not on earth so base a knave as the man who wins the love of a woman when he knows that he cannot or ought not to requite it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit