quotations about love
When a man and woman are successfully in love, their whole activity is energized and victorious. They walk better, their digestion improves, they think more clearly, their secret worries drop away, the world is fresh and interesting, and they can do more than they dreamed that they could do. In love of this kind sexual intimacy is not the dead end of desire as it is in romantic or promiscuous love, but periodic affirmation of the inward delight of desire pervading an active life.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Morals
Love does not dominate; it cultivates.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
attributed, Words of Wisdom: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Love can get nasty when there's people involved.
MIKE WRATHELL
"Mozart's 'Figaro' Flies Thru Detroit!", America Jr., November 14, 2017
In seeing there is love, in being seen there is abhorrence. One grins, trying to bear the pain of being seen. But not just anyone can be someone who only looks. If the one who is looked at looks back, then the person who was looking becomes the one who is looked at.
KOBO ABE
The Box Man
I swallowed hard. Was I ready for the Wager of Love? It was still a gamble and there would be no guarantee of happiness, but I would not remain one of the Cowards of Love scattered around me. I knew that one could not be the Empire's greatest lover without truly knowing how to love. And yet I no longer even aspired to this hollow title. I wanted only what every common husband can achieve--to be the greatest lover of my very own wife.
DOUGLAS CARLTON ABRAMS
The Lost Diary of Don Juan
Our love, too, proceeding from ourselves and returning to us, would suffice to make our life blessed, and would stand in need of no extraneous enjoyment.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God
Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you?
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Lighthousekeeping
Sure, love vincit omnia; is immeasurably above all ambition, more precious than wealth, more noble than name. He knows not life who knows not that: he hath not felt the highest faculty of the soul who hath not enjoyed it.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
Days will come when the magic of the senses shall fade. And when this enchantment has fled, then it first becomes evident whether we are truly worthy of love.
T. S. ARTHUR
"The Evening Before Marriage", Orange Blossoms
Love is a religion, and its rituals cost more than those of other religions. It goes by quickly and, like a street urchin, it likes to mark its passage by a trail of devastation.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Pere Goriot
To me, love is a pure idea forged in flesh, awkwardly maybe, but it had to connect to somewhere, despite twists and turns of underground cable. An all-too-perfect thing. Sometimes the lines get crossed. Or you get a wrong number. But that's nobody's fault. It'll always be like that, so long as we exist in this physical form. As a matter of principle.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Dance, Dance, Dance
If we love a person, we love him, and whatever he may do will not affect our love. It may cause us pain if he does evil, because we love him; it may cause us sorrow and suffering; but it cannot affect our love.
C. W. LEADBEATER
The Hidden Side of Christian Festivals
I really thought that love would save us all.
JOHN LENNON
attributed, The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 10, 1980
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
Until Obi met Clara on board the cargo boat Sasa he had thought of love as another grossly over-rated European invention.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
Love is in that moment when you're in separate rooms trying to get the kids to sleep, and you unexpectedly get butterflies in your stomach because you're excited that you get to hang out with your best friend soon. It's in that conversation on the couch in your sweatpants eating Pad Thai out of a box while you exchange stories about things your children did and replay videos of them being adorable even though they've only been asleep for five minutes.
RASHA RUSHDY
"Love Is Sweatpants and Take-out, Actually", Huffington Post, February 14, 2016
Be the love that the world needs to survive, to thrive, and to continue make being alive more worthwhile.
SONYA MATEJKO
"This Is What I Know About The World At 24", Huffington Post, April 5, 2016
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
The girlish talk of love and lovers is henceforth stale and commonplace. The cheap jokes of the comic papers on love and its poor counterfeit, flirtation, are a blasphemy. Love-romances and love-poems have lost their charm, so inadequate are they to tell love's true story. She is herself the romance; she is herself the poem.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
Love is like a good piece of wood: It just gets stronger and stronger as the years go by.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Christmas Train