quotations about love
If you have given up your heart ... you have already lost. A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast.
STEPHEN KING
The Drawing of the Three
Love between a man and woman is war.
AUGUST STRINDBERG
The Father
Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.
ELLEN KEY
"The Morality of Woman"
Love is... carefully curated ignorance.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016
You will never again love someone the same way as you did the one who got away, but you can love again and only when you allow yourself to give up the dream of finding your way back to that one certain person will you really see what else lies ahead. True love never ends but relationships and marriages do and sometimes the broken pieces are just never meant to be put back together. Heal yourself, heal your heart, and believe that new love can be just as great, or even better, than the idealistic love you have carried around with you for much too long. Free yourself and new love will come again.
SHANNON FERGUSON
"Sometimes Love Is Simply Not Enough", Huffington Post, May 13, 2016
If one loves, one need not have an ideology of love.
BRUCE LEE
The Warrior Within: The Philosophies of Bruce Lee
Love -- is anterior to Life --
Posterior -- to Death --
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth.
EMILY DICKINSON
"Love is anterior to Life"
Love clamors far more incessantly and passionately at a closed gate than an open one!
MARIE CORELLI
The Master Christian
Love is the only thing that pays for birth,
Or makes death welcome. Oh, dear God above
This beautiful but sad, perplexing earth,
Pity the hearts that know--or know not--Love!
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"What Love Is"
Love is the root of creation; God's essence; worlds without number
Lie in his bosom like children; he made them for this purpose only.
Only to love and to be loved again.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"The Children of the Lord's Supper"
Ah, cruel 'tis to love,
And cruel not to love,
But cruelest of all
To love and love in vain.
ANACREON
"Ode XXIX", Odes
All you need is love. And a tiara. And maybe a cookie.
ANONYMOUS
If somebody says "I love you" to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? "I love you, too."
KURT VONNEGUT
Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons
To describe love-making is immoral and immodest; you know it is. To describe it as it really is, or would appear to you and me as lookers-on, would be to describe the most dreary farce, to chronicle the most tautological twaddle. To take note of sighs, hand-squeezes, looks at the moon, and so forth--does this business become our dignity as historians? Come away from those foolish young people--they don't want us; and dreary as their farce is, and tautological as their twaddle, you may be sure it amuses them, and that they are happy enough without us.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Philip
Why does one love? How queer it is to see only one being in the world, to have only one thought in one's mind, only one desire in the heart, and only one name on the lips--a name which comes up continually, rising, like the water in a spring, from the depths of the soul to the lips, a name which one repeats over and over again, which one whispers ceaselessly, everywhere, like a prayer.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
"Was it a Dream?"
All love is sweet,
Given or returned. Common as light is love,
And its familiar voice wearies not ever.
Like the wide heaven, the all-sustaining air,
It makes the reptile equal to the God;
They who inspire it most are fortunate,
As I am now; but those who feel it most
Are happier still.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Prometheus Unbound
Free-market free love is simultaneously a utopian idea and a dystopian idea. The idea of total sexual freedom is an ideal, but then it's also a Michel Houellebecq nightmare. Now online dating and apps have made that normal. Everyone is "on the market" or "off the market"; friends with "benefits," "investing" time--these are all economic metaphors.
MOIRA WEIGEL
"Love in a Time of Capital: An Interview With Moira Weigel", The Nation, August 29, 2016
Love is a two-way street constantly under construction.
CARROLL BRYANT
blog post, September 19, 2012
Love is in the fresh bottle of cold water that magically appears by your bedside lamp every night, because he knows you get thirsty when you get up to nurse the baby every two hours.
RASHA RUSHDY
"Love Is Sweatpants and Take-out, Actually", Huffington Post, February 14, 2016
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
JAMES BALDWIN
The Fire Next Time