quotations about love
The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.
ANITA BROOKNER
A Friend from England
Love was a country he knew nothing about.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
No wound is worse than counterfeited love.
SOPHOCLES
Antigone
There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
Barchester Towers
Love and money should properly have nothing to do with each other.
JOHN SAUL
Guardian
One of the remarkable things about love is that, despite very irritating people writing poems and songs about how pleasant it is, it really is quite pleasant.
DANIEL HANDLER
as Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
Love is like the wild rose-briar;
Friendship like the holly-tree.
The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms,
But which will bloom most constantly?
EMILY BRONTE
Love and Friendship
Didn't love, like a plant from India, require a prepared soil, a particular temperature? Sighs in the moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over hands yielded to a lover, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness thus could not be separated from the balconies of great châteaux filled with idle amusements, a boudoir with silk blinds, a good thick carpet, full of pots of flowers, and a bed raised on a dais, nor from the sparkle of precious stones and shoulder knots on servants' livery.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
The caresses over which love presides are always pure.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
To speak of love is to make love.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
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
Hatred stirs up dissension, but love covers over all wrongs.
BIBLE
Proverbs 10:12
Love is many things and sometimes we are never really sure if it even exists, but all I know is that if you were to show me her soul in a photograph, I wouldn't even ask to see the others.
CHRISTOPHER POINDEXTER
Remington Typewriter Poetry
For me the cosmic aeons lie complete,
O Love, between thy forehead and thy feet!
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love
The stage is more beholding to love, than the life of man; for as to the stage, love is even matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief; sometimes like a siren, sometimes like a fury.
JOHN LOCKE
"Of Love", The Conduct of the Understanding: Essays, Moral, Economical, and Political
Love is intangible and invisible. If you want to reduce it to materialism, it is a biologically adaptive impulse to ensure the survival of your genes. But nothing makes nonsense of scientific materialism more comprehensively than the mystery of love. All the truly real things are not measurable.
TIM LOTT
"Love is ... a torment and a joy. And it's not for softies", The Guardian, July 22, 2016
Tim Lott (born 23 January 1956) is a novelist, travel journalist, and an occasional op-ed writer for the Independent on Sunday.
The music that inspires the souls of lovers exists within themselves and the private universe they occupy. They share it with each other; they do not share it with the tribe or with society. The courage to hear that music and to honor it is one of the prerequisites of romantic love.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN
The Psychology of Romantic Love
The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
Love is like infinity: You can't have more or less infinity, and you can't compare two things to see if they're "equally infinite." Infinity just is, and that's the way I think love is, too.
FRED ROGERS
The World According to Mister Rogers
Love is the cheapest of religions.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, Dec. 21, 1939