quotations about love
Some things you can feel coming. You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. When you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.
UMBERTO ECO
Foucault's Pendulum
Love is ... telling someone when they have crap between their teeth.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016
To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
Graziella: A Story of Italian Love
Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul.
JAMES JOYCE
notes for his play Exiles
I've found out that falling in love doesn't have anything to do with time. It can take a year or an instant. It happens when it's ready to happen.
NORA ROBERTS
The Calhouns
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
We outgrow love like other things
And put it in the drawer,
Till it an antique fashion shows
Like costumes grandsires wore.
EMILY DICKINSON
"We Outgrow Love Like Other Things"
Duty makes us do things well, but love makes us do them beautifully.
ZIG ZIGLAR
See You at the Top
When people say, "God is love," I think they mean that love is extremely important, or that God really wants us to love. But in Christian conception, God really has love as his essence.
TIMOTHY KELLER
The Reason for God
In the beginning, love is all you know. You don't know it is love, of course, all you know is that some soft, good-smelling person holds you, feeds you, talks to you and empties your pants when they are full. As you age you come to realize this feeling is, indeed, love, and mommy and daddy become the center of your universe. You love them more than anything, other than your dog, your bike and your sister, of course, if you must. It is an all-encompassing, all-consuming love that warms you like the sun and sustains you like the air you breathe. And that brand of love is all you know until one day a blonde girl across the classroom bats her eyes at you or a dark-eyed boy in the hall gives you a crooked, pimply grin, and your insides turn to warm mush. At first you think you might have gotten a bad taco at lunch, but no, it is love.
JEFF MULLIN
"Love is a lifelong thrill ride", Enid News, February 14, 2016
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 fades, the dreamer wakes, the dream is brief.
MAURICE BROWNE
"At Dawn"
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?"
You can fall in love with life, you can fall in love with yourself and with those around you. Tell the people important to you that you love them, and most importantly treat them like you do. Don't take love for granted because it's what binds the world together.
SONYA MATEJKO
"This Is What I Know About The World At 24", Huffington Post, April 5, 2016
Man ever is and always shall be blessed; for he loves, and love is an onward current that never ebbs; and borne upon this current humanity will at last make its far, fair haven; and meanwhile, as it voyages, it will find the course not too rough, but glorified by frequent halcyon days and calm nights set with stars.
FRANK CUMMINS LOCKWOOD
Robert Browning
Let your love flow out on all living things.
WILLIAM STYRON
Sophie's Choice
We love being in love, that's the truth on't. If we had not met Joan, we should have met Kate, and adored her. We know our mistresses are no better than many other women, nor no prettier, nor no wiser, nor no wittier. 'Tis not for these reasons we love a woman, or for any special quality or charm I know of; we might as well demand that a lady should be the tallest woman in the world, like the Shropshire giantess, as that she should be a paragon in any other character, before we began to love her.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Esmond
Becoming addicted to love isn't uncommon. The chemicals released during that first phase are the same or similar to those released when consuming cocaine or drinking alcohol. And for some people the desire to feel that way all the time can be hard to resist.
KURT SMITH
"Yes, it is Possible to Be Addicted to Love", beliefnet, August 8, 2018
With the secularization of the Western world, we are turning to romantic love to give us what we once looked for in the realm of the divine. Transcendence, meaning, wholeness, and ecstasy.
ESTHER PEREL
"A top couples' therapist says our 'religion of romantic love' is making relationships harder", Business Insider, November 10, 2017
If you think love makes you happy, you've either never been in love, or never been in love long enough to have to start compromising.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Obsidian Butterfly