quotations about love
The plough of Time breaks up our Eden-land,
And tramples down its fruitful flowery prime.
Yet thro' the dust of ages living shoots
O' the old immortal seed start in the furrows;
And, where Love looked on with glorious eye,
These quicken'd germs of everlastingness
Flower lusty, as of old in Paradise!
GERALD MASSEY
"Wooed and Won"
The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Conversations with Samuel R. Delany
The only way to experience love is to buy it and have it installed in your head. But, like most technology, its shelf-life is limited.
GERMAIN LUSSIER
"Love Is a Gadget in This Upcoming Scott Eastwood Film", Gizmodo, August 15, 2016
The flame of anger, bright and brief,
Sharpens the barb of Love.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Tell Me Not Things Past all Belief
The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Fusees
One of the cruelest things about a wrong love is that it delights in tangles and hidden ways; that it teaches and practices deceit from its first inception; that its earliest efforts are toward destroying all older and more sacred attachments.
AMELIA E. BARR
A Singer from the Sea
Oh, love. Love is best of all. There is no such total element, not even pain. Who has ever loved, knows this. I need not say more.
TANITH LEE
Mortal Suns
Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Heart of the Matter
Nuptial love maketh mankind; friendly love perfecteth it; but wanton love corrupteth, and embaseth it.
SIR FRANCIS BACON
"Of Love", Essays, or Counsels Civil and Moral
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
Need we say it was not love,
Now that love is perished?
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
"Passer Mortuus Est"
Love, I find is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Dust Tracks on a Road
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
JOHN DONNE
The Sun Rising
Love's language everywhere is known.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Love's Language"
Love was altogether more predatory. It was concerned with pursuit, capture, enjoyment; it was caused by beauty, the way raw red skin is caused by the sun; it was an appetite, like hunger or thirst, a physical discomfort that tortured you until it was satisfied.
K. J. PARKER
Devices and Desires
Love strips the mask from each of us, and we must endeavor for those we love to put the mask on so that it can be taken off again. For if there is no mask to start with, there is no pleasure in removing it.
KOBO ABE
The Face of Another
Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Love makes the world go round.
FRENCH PROVERB
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
Love it is the precious loom,
Whose shuttle weaves each tangled thread,
And works flowers of exquisite bloom,
Shedding their perfume where we tread.
JAMES MCINTYRE
"Power of Love"