quotations about love
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"The Meeting in a Dream", Other Inquisitions
If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.
LYNDA BARRY
attributed, The Surrendered Single
Thou demandest what is love? It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"On Love", Essays and Letters
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
Had we never lov'd sae kindly,
Had we never lov'd sae blindly,
Never met -- or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
ROBERT BURNS
Ae Fond Kiss
It is only the souls that do not love that go empty in this world.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary
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
Love is like dew that falls on both nettles and lilies.
SWEDISH PROVERB
God has set his intentions in the flowers, in the dawn, in the spring--it is his will that we should love.
VICTOR HUGO
Toilers of the Sea
Victor Marie Hugo (1802-1885) is considered the most important of the French Romantic writers. Though regarded in France as one of that country's greatest poets, he is better known abroad for such novels as Les Misérables (1862) and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831).
Love is enough: though the World be a-waning,
And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining,
Though the sky be too dark for dim eyes to discover
The gold-cups and daisies fair blooming thereunder,
Though the hills be held shadows, and the sea a dark wonder
And this day draw a veil over all deeds pass'd over,
Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter;
The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter
These lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover.
WILLIAM MORRIS
"Love Is Enough"
Love is like butter, it goes well with bread.
YIDDISH PROVERB
Upon the roadway of my life,
A guide-board I will leave of love,
So those who follow in my steps
May guided be to hills above.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Love's Guide-Board"
When love enters, the whole spiritual constitution of a man changes, is filled with the Holy Ghost, and almost his form is altered.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Sons and Lovers
David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 - 2 March 1930) was an English writer and poet. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection on the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization. His opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage".
Love. My golly, it sells diapers, don't it!
DAVID MAMET
Goldberg Street: Short Plays and Monologues
Love is the centre and circumference;
The cause and aim of all things--'tis the key
To joy and sorrow, and the recompense
For all the ills that have been, or may be.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"What Love Is"
O little hour of Love, so wild and sweet!
I gave the world, thy honey-dew to eat;
And now the tear-sown pathway of the dead
Echoes the patter of thy flying feet.
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love
Love is ... knowing that, should it come to it, they would want you to hollow out their corpse and use the carcass as a one-man tent to keep warm. Should it come to it.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016
When love is full grown it has few words, and sometimes it growls them out.
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Old Gorgon Graham
Love is a wound that never heals.
GERMAN PROVERB
Falling in Love, as modern biology teaches us to believe, is nothing more than the latest, highest, and most involved exemplification, in the human race, of that almost universal selective process which Mr. Darwin has enabled us to recognise throughout the whole long series of the animal kingdom. The butterfly that circles and eddies in his aerial dance around his observant mate is endeavouring to charm her by the delicacy of his colouring, and to overcome her coyness by the display of his skill. The peacock that struts about in imperial pride under the eyes of his attentive hens, is really contributing to the future beauty and strength of his race by collecting to himself a harem through whom he hands down to posterity the valuable qualities which have gained the admiration of his mates in his own person. Mr. Wallace has shown that to be beautiful is to be efficient; and sexual selection is thus, as it were, a mere lateral form of natural selection--a survival of the fittest in the guise of mutual attractiveness and mutual adaptability, producing on the average a maximum of the best properties of the race in the resulting offspring. I need not dwell here upon this aspect of the case, because it is one with which, since the publication of the 'Descent of Man,' all the world has been sufficiently familiar.
GRANT ALLEN
"Falling in Love", Falling in Love and Other Essays