quotations about love
The poorest lives some little blossoms bring
To deck Love's altar in the days of spring.
ELSA BARKER
"The Garden of Rose and Rue", The Book of Love
Love defies all calculation. We are not judicious in love; we do not select those whom we ought to love, but those whom we cannot help loving.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
attributed, Proust Was a Neuroscientist
Hello beautiful thing, maybe you could save my life.
In just a glance, down here on magic street,
Loves a fool's dance
And I ain't got much sense, but I still got my feet.
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
"Girls in Their Summer Clothes", Magic
Man loves most that which is his own.
HENRY ADAMS
Historical Essays
What will a man not do when frantic with love? To what baseness will he not demean himself? What pangs will he not make others suffer, so that he may ease his selfish heart?
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
Trust Love, nor fear to soar upon his track.
The wings that bore to Heaven will bear thee back.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
To love is to destroy, and ... to be loved is to be the one destroyed.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Bones
Love is like a friendship caught on fire.
In the beginning a flame,
Very pretty, often hot and fierce
But still only light and flickering.
As love grows older, our hearts mature
And our love becomes as coals,
Deep-burning and unquenchable.
BRUCE LEE
attributed, Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew
Well they say that love is in the air, but never is it clear,
How to pull it close and make it stay
Butterflies are free to fly, and so they fly away
And I'm left to carry on and wonder why
SHERYL CROW
"Always on Your Side"
What amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy--and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.
ANNE ENRIGHT
The Gathering
The weight of love
Has buoyed me up
Till my head
Knocks against the sky.
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
O Magazine, Feb. 2007
If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another's; if we feel, we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood. This is Love.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"On Love", Essays and Letters
If a thing loves, it is infinite.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Annotations to Swedenborg
The affections are like lightning: you cannot tell where they will strike till they have fallen.
HENRI-DOMINIQUE LACORDAIRE
attributed, A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern
Love -- is anterior to Life --
Posterior -- to Death --
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth.
EMILY DICKINSON
"Love is anterior to Life"
Love is a king who reigns without laws.
SPANISH PROVERB
Love is one of the last things that gives meaning and magic in a world where god is dead and nothing matters anymore.
BRENDAN O'CONNOR
"Love is ...", The Independent, February 15, 2016
Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others. As long as its spell lasts, the only in-between which can insert itself between two lovers is the child, love's own product. The child, this in-between, to which the lovers now are related and which they hold in common, is representative of the world in that it also separates them; it is an indication that they will insert a new world into the existing world. Through the child, it is as though the lovers return to the world from which their love had expelled them. But this new worldliness, the possible result and the only possibly happy ending of a love affair, is, in a sense, the end of love, which must either overcome the partners anew or be transformed into another mode of belonging together.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Human Condition
Love is... carefully curated ignorance.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016
Ah, love is a voyage with water and a star,
in drowning air and squalls of precipitate bran;
love is a war of lights in the lightning flashes,
two bodies blasted in a single burst of honey.
PABLO NERUDA
Morning XII