quotations about love
Love is the union between natural craving and sentiment.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Love is not at the mercy of time and it does not recognize death, they are strangers to each other.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
She has not fallen in love. Love has been a flight, not a fall. She has risen into a new life; in her is born a new experience. Perhaps it has come suddenly, with a rush which has overwhelmed her with its tumultuous surprise. Perhaps it has grown gradually, so gradually that she has been quite unconscious of its advent until it has taken complete possession of her. As the water lily bursts open the moment the sun strikes upon it, and the rose turns from bud to blossom so gradually that the closest observation discerns no movement in the petals, so some souls bloom instantly when love touches them with its sunbeam, and others, unconscious and unobserved, pass from girlhood to womanhood. In either case it is love that works the miracle. She has not known the secret of her own heart. Or if she has known it, she cannot tell it to any one else --no, not even to herself! She only knows that within her is a secret room, wherein is a sacred shrine. But she has not the key; and what is enshrined there she will not permit even herself to know. She is a strange contradiction to herself. She is restless away from him and strangely silent in his presence, or breaks the silence only to be still more strangely voluble. She chides herself for not being herself, and has in truth become or is becoming another self. So one could imagine a green shoot beckoned imperiously by the sunlight, and neither daring to emerge from its familiar life beneath the ground nor able to resist the impulse; or a bird irresistibly called by life, and neither daring to break the egg nor able to remain longer in the prison-house of its infancy.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos
Love's the big hint life can't stop dropping, the biggest beguilement of all.
GLEN DUNCAN
By Blood We Live
True Christian love is not derived from things without, but floweth from the heart, as from a spring.
MARTIN LUTHER
Sermon XI, A Selection of the Most Celebrated Sermons of M. Luther and J. Calvin
Let us suppose the loved one is as madly impelled toward the lover. In a few days, in an hour, nay, in an instant -- for there is such a thing as love at first sight -- this man and woman, two unrelated individuals, who may never have seen each other before, conceive a passion, greater, intenser than all other affections, friendships, and social relations. So great, so intense is it, that the world could crumble to star-dust so long as their souls rushed together. If necessary, they would break all ties, forsake all friends, abandon all blood kin, run away from all moral responsibilities. There can be no discussion.... We see it every day, for love is the most perfectly selfish thing in the universe.
JACK LONDON
The Kempton-Wace Letters
All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Other Wind
Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929 - January 22, 2018) was an American author best known for her works of speculative fiction. Her literary career spanned nearly sixty years, yielding more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children's books.
Love thy neighbor, but pull not down thy hedge.
GERMAN PROVERB
Take away love, and our earth is a tomb!
ROBERT BROWNING
"Fra Lippo Lippi"
Nothing is so strange when one is in love ... as the complete indifference of other people.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Mrs. Dalloway
In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook
The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Surfacing
Margaret Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. Her works encompass a variety of themes including gender and identity, religion and myth, the power of language, climate change, and "power politics".
The plough of Time breaks up our Eden-land,
And tramples down its fruitful flowery prime.
Yet thro' the dust of ages living shoots
O' the old immortal seed start in the furrows;
And, where Love looked on with glorious eye,
These quicken'd germs of everlastingness
Flower lusty, as of old in Paradise!
GERALD MASSEY
"Wooed and Won"
The world gets grimy and the love object is in stark relief from it's surroundings. This is love, a pretty thing on an ugly street.
DANIEL HANDLER
Adverbs
Loving is like music. Some instruments can go up two octaves, some four, and some all the way from black thunder to sharp lightning. As some of them are susceptible only of melody, so some hearts can sing but one song of love, while others will fun in a full choral harmony.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
Is--Love, forgive us!--cinders, ashes, dust;
Love in a palace is perhaps at last
More grievous torment than a hermit's fast.
JOHN KEATS
"Lamia"
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.
I've never had my heart broken ... It's a very sad state of affairs. I think everybody should have their heart broken. I don't think it says anything good about me at all ... My lover and my best friend and my partner has been my work. But I certainly would in life have wanted to know--would like to know--what it was like to have a real partner.
SALLY FIELD
Good Housekeeping, Mar. 2009
He who knows Love becomes Love, and he knows
All beings are himself, twin-born of Love.
ELSA BARKER
He Who Knows Love