quotations about love
Could there be finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very essence of love?
JANE AUSTEN
Pride and Prejudice
For a long time visits among lovers and professions of love are kept up through habit, after their behavior has plainly proved that love no longer exists.
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.
I think love is serious. It's like an invention: sometimes it lies deep down inside you, great and quiet--and at other times it racks you and keeps you from sleeping.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
Septimus
I feel like, when we're kids, you're sold into this fairy tale of what love is. That Prince Charming's gonna come along and save you and you're gonna live happily ever after. They're gonna rescue me from the Bronx, and we're gonna go off and live in a castle somewhere and it's gonna be awesome. He's gonna love me forever, and I'm gonna love him forever, and it's gonna be real easy. And it's so different than that.
JENNIFER LOPEZ
interview with Maria Shriver, The Today Show, November 3, 2014
Love is a very contradiction of all the elements of our ordinary nature -- it makes the proud man meek -- the cheerful, sad -- the high-spirited, tame; our strongest resolutions, our hardiest energy fail before it. Believe me, you cannot prophesy of its future effect in a man from any knowledge of his past character.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Eugene Aram: A Tale
Love makes you do stupid things -- like making someone an omelet for no good reason other than to see them smile. Gross.
CARLA HERRERIA
"6 Reasons Being In Love Is The Absolute Worst", Huffington Post, February 12, 2016
Love can get nasty when there's people involved.
MIKE WRATHELL
"Mozart's 'Figaro' Flies Thru Detroit!", America Jr., November 14, 2017
Love strips the mask from each of us, and we must endeavor for those we love to put the mask on so that it can be taken off again. For if there is no mask to start with, there is no pleasure in removing it.
KOBO ABE
The Face of Another
I shall be loved as quiet things
Are loved--white pigeons in the sun,
Curled yellow leaves that whisper down
One after one;
The silver reticence of smoke
That tells no secret of its birth
Among the fiery agonies
That turn the earth.
KARLE WILSON BAKER
"I Shall Be Loved as Quiet Things"
Karle Wilson Baker (1878-1960) was an American poet and author. She was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for her last collection of poetry, Dreamers on Horseback, in 1931.
Love is an amazing magnet.
NICHOLSON BAKER
Traveling Sprinkler
The true coronation of character is love. The true test of love is self-sacrifice. He knows not how to love who knows not how to suffer for love's sake. The love that costs nothing is worth--what it costs.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Old Testament Shadows of New Testament Truths
A man in love is a man under the strong influence of a highly charged image which even if it is far different from the reality as other people see it, nevertheless guides his ideas, feelings, and behavior.
ERIC BERNE
The Mind in Action
Love fattens on smooth words.
KATHARINE HEPBURN
Me: Stories of My Life
When you get in love you are made all over again. The person who loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass. So there are two you's, the one you create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't be any difference between the two you's or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
Four Quarters, 1970
I think love adds to everything. I'm an old softie about that. I think love is the most important thing in life. If you don't have [a relationship], you're always looking for one. It's the motivator, the driver.
SHERYL CROW
Dr. Drew interview, 2001
Ah, when love dies, women lose two and a half inches in height.
M. C. BEATON
Love, Lies and Liquor
The clearer and happier you feel inside, the more joyous and loving your outer world becomes because love attracts love.
JUDY HALL
Love Crystals
When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able together to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart's history.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The Burning Secret and Other Stories
Love enters the heart unawares: takes precedence of all the emotions--or, at least, will be second to none--and even reflection becomes its accomplice. While it lives, it renders blind; and when it has struck its roots deep only itself can shake them. It reminds one of hospitality as practiced among the ancients. The stranger was received upon the threshold of the half-open door, and introduced into the sanctuary reserved for the Penates. Not until every attention had been lavished upon him did the host ask his name; and the question was sometimes deferred till the very moment of departure.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles", The Writings of Madame Swetchine