quotations about love
Love is not enough. But, it is the rock on which all else stands.
NORA ROBERTS
Blood Brothers
Love--what a volume in a word, an ocean in a tear,
A seventh heaven in a glance, a whirlwind in a sigh,
The lightning in a touch, a millennium in a moment,
What concentrated joy or woe in blest or blighted love!
For it is that native poetry springing up indigenous to Mind,
The heart's own-country music thrilling all its chords,
The story without an end that angels throng to hear,
The word, the king of words, carved on Jehovah's heart!
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
The Days Before
It is certain there is no other passion which does produce such contrary effects in so great a degree. But this may be said for love, that if you strike it out of the soul, life would be insipid, and our being but half animated. Human nature would sink into deadness and lethargy, if not quickened with some active principle; and as for all others, whether ambition, envy, or avarice, which are apt to possess the mind in the absence of this passion, it must be allowed that they have greater pains, without the compensation of such exquisite pleasures as those we find in love.
JOSEPH ADDISON
"The Passion of Love", Essays Moral and Humorous
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"The Meeting in a Dream", Other Inquisitions
In the vacuum of the heart love falls forever.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit is Rich
The measure of love is to have no mean, the end to be everlasting.
JOHN LYLY
Euphues and His England
When they speak of it, this love of theirs, they speak as of a kind of grand mal brought on catastrophically by a bacillus unknown to science but everywhere present in the air about us, like the tuberculosis spore, and to which all but the coldest constitutions are susceptible.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities
Love is a stream that will find its course.
JAMAICAN PROVERB
Love is the sum of all the arts, as it is the reason for their existence.
JACK LONDON
The Valley of the Moon
It is easy to halve the potato where there's love.
IRISH PROVERB
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
Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.
GEORGE ELIOT
Silas Marner
A history of listening to Top 40 radio had left me with a ridiculous and clichéd notion of love. I had never entertained the feeling myself but knew that it meant never having to say you're sorry. It was a many-splendored thing. Love was a rose and a hammer. Both blind and all-seeing, it made the world go round.
DAVID SEDARIS
Naked
Love is the cheapest of religions.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, Dec. 21, 1939
Love is when you come back from the supermarket having rung ten times to check what is needed and you arrive in and take off your wet coat and there's no milk and you go back out.
BRENDAN O'CONNOR
"Love is ...", The Independent, February 15, 2016
Hatred stirs up dissension, but love covers over all wrongs.
BIBLE
Proverbs 10:12
Love dwindles by pairing.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Love is a flaming heart, and its flames aspire
Till they cloud the soul in the smoke of a windy fire.
ARTHUR SYMONS
"In the Wood of Finvara"
Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in his glowing hands;
Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.
Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.
ALFRED TENNYSON
Locksley Hall