LOVE QUOTES XLIII

quotations about love

From the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreathes heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this--love; while the women ... would all the time be feeling, this is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

To the Lighthouse

Tags: Virginia Woolf


Experience is bitter, but its teachings we retain; It has taught me this--who once has loved, loves never on earth again!

GEORGE ARNOLD

"Introspection"

Tags: George Arnold


Be worthy love, and love will come.

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT

Little Women


Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

ANAIS NIN

attributed, French Writers of the Past

Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903 - January 14, 1977) was a French-Cuban American diarist, essayist, novelist and writer of short stories and erotica. Nin's most studied works are her diaries or journals, which detail her marriages to Hugh Parker Guiler and Rupert Pole, in addition to her numerous affairs, including those with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and writer Henry Miller.

Tags: Anais Nin


"God is love" became inverted into "love is God", so that it is now the West's undeclared religion--and perhaps its only generally accepted religion.

SIMON MAY

Love: A History


You see, love is strong. Stronger than hate even. Love is the only thing that can kill hate, nothing else. You see, hate destroys and that's why love is stronger. It builds.

PETER ABRAHAMS

The Path of Thunder

Tags: Peter Abrahams


You are wrong if you think you cannot live without love. I cannot live without it. I do not mean that I go into a decline, develop odd symptoms, became a caricature. I mean that I cannot live well without it. I cannot think or act or speak or write or even dream with any kind of energy in the absence of love. I feel excluded from the living world. I become cold, fish-like, immobile. I implode.

ANITA BROOKNER

Hotel du Lac


With whom shall a young lady fall in love but with the person she sees? She is not supposed to lose her heart in a dream, like a Princess in the "Arabian Nights;" or to plight her young affections to the portrait of a gentleman in the Exhibition, or a sketch in the "Illustrated London News." You have an instinct within you which inclines you to attach yourself to some one: you meet Somebody: you hear Somebody constantly praised; you walk, or ride, or waltz, or talk, or sit in the same pew at church with Somebody: you meet again, and again, and--"Marriages are made in Heaven," your dear mamma says, pinning your orange-flower wreath on, with her blessed eyes dimmed with tears--and there is a wedding breakfast, and you take off your white satin and retire to your coach-and-four, and you and he are a happy pair--Or, the affair is broken off and then, poor dear wounded heart! Why then you meet Somebody Else, and twine your young affections round number two. It is your nature so to do. Do you suppose it is all for the man's sake that you love, and not a bit for your own? Do you suppose you would drink if you were not thirsty, or eat if you were not hungry?

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

Pendennis


Who strikes man with love -- God or the Devil?

LEONID ANDREYEV

He Who Gets Slapped

Tags: Leonid Andreyev


We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept--our own selves--that we love.

FERNANDO PESSOA

The Book of Disquiet

Tags: Fernando Pessoa


We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.

GRAHAM GREENE

The End of the Affair


True love, selfless love, does not wither as beauty fades or life becomes difficult. If anything, its roots grow deeper and its branches spread farther with each shared experience.

EDITOR

"Music and the Spoken Word: What love is", Deseret News, April 2, 2016


There is nothing like love. Love is foreplay to lust. It's a carnal world, let's get real.

VIKRAM BHATT

"Love is an excuse ... it's all about lust", Deccan Chronicle, March 28, 2016


The reveries of two solitary souls prepare the sweetness of loving.

GASTON BACHELARD

The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos

Tags: Gaston Bachelard


Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.

ANNE CARSON

Eros the Bittersweet

Tags: Anne Carson


Never seek to tell thy love
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind does move
Silently, invisibly.

WILLIAM BLAKE

Poems from Blake's Notebook


Marriage--what an abomination! Love--yes, but not marriage. Love cannot exist in marriage, because love is an ideal; that is to say, something not quite understood--transparencies, colour, light, a sense of the unreal. But a wife--you know all about her--who her father was, who her mother was, what she thinks of you and her opinion of the neighbours over the way. Where, then, is the dream, the au dela? There is none. I say in marriage an au dela is impossible ... the endless duet of the marble and the water, the enervation of burning odours, the baptismal whiteness of women, light, ideal tissues, eyes strangely dark with kohl, names that evoke palm trees and ruins, Spanish moonlight or maybe Persepolis. The monosyllable which epitomizes the ennui and the prose of our lives is heard not, thought not there--only the nightingale-harmony of an eternal yes. Freedom limitless; the Mahometan stands on the verge of the abyss, and the spaces of perfume and colour extend and invite him with the whisper of a sweet unending yes. The unknown, the unreal ... Thus love is possible, there is a delusion, an au dela.

GEORGE MOORE

Confessions of a Young Man

Tags: George Moore


Love, however doomed, had the capacity to attach buoys to the soul.

ARIANA FRANKLIN

Mistress of the Art of Death

Tags: Ariana Franklin


Love others and as you do, that love will return to you.

CLAY AIKEN

Learning to Sing: Hearing the Music in Your Life

Tags: Clay Aiken


Love makes its record in deeper colors as we grow out of childhood into manhood; as the Emperors signed their names in green ink when under age, but when of age, in purple.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Table-Talk

Tags: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow