quotations about love
A summer breeze can be very refreshing; but if we try to put it in a tin can so we can have it entirely to ourselves, the breeze will die. Our beloved is the same. He is like a breeze, a cloud, a flower. If you imprison him in a tin can, he will die. Yet many people do just that. They rob their loved one of his liberty, until he can no longer be himself. They live to satisfy themselves and use their loved one to help them fulfill that. That is not loving; it is destroying.
THICH NHAT HANH
Teachings on Love
As the gambler said of his dice, to love and win is the best thing, to love and lose is the next best.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERY
Pendennis
He who has loved often ... has loved never.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
The Last Days of Pompeii
I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don't want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that's the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.
KURT VONNEGUT
The Paris Review, spring 1977
If a man can be properly said to love something, it must be clear that he feels affection for it as a whole, and does not love part of it to the exclusion of the rest.
PLATO
The Republic
It isn't enough to love people because they're good to you, or because in some way or other you're going to get something by it. We have to love because we love loving.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
A Bit O' Love
Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved.
VICTOR HUGO
Les Miserables
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 ain't nothing but a monster with two heads.
COLEMAN HELL
"2 Heads"
Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.
JOHN DONNE
The Anagram
Love had a thousand shapes.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
Love holds everything together with a girdle of barbed wire encased in a sheath of pink cotton wool.
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.
Love is ... taking years to unpack their neuroses, then using the space you've made to store your own.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016
Love is ... the by-product of living in a decent flat.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016
Love will sacrifice more to others than friendship, but then it exacts more from them.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
Only love heals. Anger, guilt, and fear can only destroy.
ALYSON NOEL
Evermore
Sex is the joining of two bodies; love is the joining of two souls.
GARY D. CHAPMAN
Making Love
Gary Demonte Chapman (born January 10, 1938) is an American author, radio talk show host, and the senior associate pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He is most noted for his book The Five Love Languages, which outlines five general ways that romantic partners express and experience love.
Some meet love's dreams when kissed by death,
And some again in youth,
But all have felt the quickening breath
Of love's undying truth.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"Love's Dreams"
Edwin Leibfreed published several books of poetry, including A Garland of Verse (1910), A Soliloquy of Life (1915), and The Man of a Thousand Loves (1932).
The world has little to bestow
Where two fond hearts in equal love are joined.
ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD
Delia
Deep Love is slow of speech and void of art;
Silence and timid tears reveal his heart.
But shallow Love is ever eloquent
To mouth his meagre passion -- and depart.
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue"
Every little thing wants to be loved.
SUE MONK KIDD
The Secret Life of Bees