quotations about love
Love is of noble birth and heavenly origin. The glory of his personality no words can describe. He is as an angel of light dwelling among the children of men.
NICIAS BALLARD COOKSEY
Helps to Happiness
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Prometheus Unbound
Many great persons have been of opinion that love is no other thing than complacency itself, in which they have had much appearance of reason. For not only does the movement of love take its origin from the complacency which the heart feels at the first approach of good, and find its end in a second complacency which returns to the heart by union with the thing beloved--but further, it depends for its preservation on this complacency, and can only subsist through it as through its mother and nurse; so that as soon as the complacency ceases, love ceases.
ST. FRANCIS DE SALES
Treatise on the Love of God
One who possesses such immense power over our existence will inspire awe that easily threatens to overwhelm us, even if we believe he will never abandon or destroy us.... Its grandeur makes us feel both powerful and powerless--not just to possess the loved one--but in our existence itself: the existence which we yearn for love to anchor. To be in a relationship of love is, in other words, always a relationship of fear; indeed, the greater the love the greater the fear.
SIMON MAY
Love: A History
Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Passion
A heat full of coldness, a sweet full of bitterness, a pain full of pleasantness, which maketh thoughts have eyes, and hearts, and ears; bred by desire, nursed by delight, weaned by jealousy, killed by dissembling, buried by ingratitude; and this is love.
JOHN LYLY
Gallathea and Midas
A pair of bright eyes with a dozen glances suffice to subdue a man; to enslave him, and enflame him; to make him even forget; they dazzle him so that the past becomes straightway dim to him; and he so prizes them that he would give all his life to possess 'em.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
Every relationship you enter into is a form of a love relationship. It is a sharing of energy, time and space. It is a partnership. It is unity in its highest form. We become intimate by the contract of the joining itself.
TERRELL WASHINGTON
"To Love is to Trust", The Good Men Project, August 18, 2016
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
letter, May 14, 1904
I don't believe you ever stop loving anyone you ever really loved. You have them there like money in the bank just because you loved them and held them in your arms or dreamed you did. You can forget a lot of things in life, but not that honey to end all honeys.
ELLEN GILCHRIST
A Dangerous Age
I profess not to know how women's hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration. Some seem to have but one vulnerable point, or door of access; while others have a thousand avenues, and may be captured in a thousand different ways. It is a great triumph of skill to gain the former, but a still greater proof of generalship to maintain possession of the latter, for man must battle for his fortress at every door and window. He who wins a thousand common hearts is therefore entitled to some renown; but he who keeps undisputed sway over the heart of a coquette is indeed a hero.
WASHINGTON IRVING
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Love can get nasty when there's people involved.
MIKE WRATHELL
"Mozart's 'Figaro' Flies Thru Detroit!", America Jr., November 14, 2017
Love dwindles by pairing.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Love for those too easily won does not last long.
ROMAN PROVERB
Love is a kind of warfare.
OVID
The Art of Love
Love is a temple, Love a higher law.
U2
"One", Achtung Baby
Love is impartial and universal in its adaptation and bestowals. It is the open fount which cries, 'Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.'
MARY BAKER EDDY
"Love that finds solutions", Christian Science Monitor, April 6, 2016
Love is something we all talk about but rarely experience. We get sucked into settling, to waiting, to a wilting dating culture, to hatred and to meaningless rendezvous or "ghosting." Love is dying, and we're all forgetting about it.
SONYA MATEJKO
"This Is What I Know About The World At 24", Huffington Post, April 5, 2016
Love is the endless verb; a relationship encompassing the ultimate in holiness. Love does conquer death because in its moment lived it's eternal in nature. Love gives us our purpose, and is our ultimate memorial.
MITCHELL HURVITZ
"Perspectives: Love is tangible presence of God", Greenwich Time, October 27, 2017
Love is the most destructive weapon of all, the only problem being how to contain and channel it into something that can be spanned, aimed and loosed.
K. J. PARKER
Devices and Desires