quotations about love
Love ... Just Nature's way of getting one person to pay the bills for another person.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
Love is many things and sometimes we are never really sure if it even exists, but all I know is that if you were to show me her soul in a photograph, I wouldn't even ask to see the others.
CHRISTOPHER POINDEXTER
Remington Typewriter Poetry
To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I.'
AYN RAND
The Fountainhead
God designs people's emotions so you fall in love with people who, in return, wouldn't even use your hollowed-out skull for a spittoon.
SCOTT ADAMS
Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!
We love instinctively, but we love well because we've learned how.
BOB LONSBERRY
A Various Language
The feeling of love is a rich feeling, but the expression of love in word or deed is a joy.
ALEXANDER LOWEN
Depression and the Body
Love is something we all talk about but rarely experience. We get sucked into settling, to waiting, to a wilting dating culture, to hatred and to meaningless rendezvous or "ghosting." Love is dying, and we're all forgetting about it.
SONYA MATEJKO
"This Is What I Know About The World At 24", Huffington Post, April 5, 2016
Though this faith in love as the one democratic, even universal, form of salvation open to us moderns is the result of a long religious history that saw divine love as the origin of human love and as the model to be imitated, it has paradoxically come into its own because of a decline in religious faith. It has been possible only because, since the end of the eighteenth century, love has increasingly filled the vacuum left by the retreat of Christianity.
SIMON MAY
Love: A History
Love's fire colors once our neutral form, to blacken to eternal embers.
ELISE PUMPELLY CABOT
"Arizona"
Heav'nly love shall outdo Hellish hate.
JOHN MILTON
Paradise Lost
Not the swart Pariah in some Indian grove,
Lone, lean, and hunted by his brother's hate,
Hath drunk so deep the cup of bitter fate
As that poor wretch who cannot, cannot love:
He bears a load which nothing can remove,
A killing, withering weight.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"The Solitary"
One of the remarkable things about love is that, despite very irritating people writing poems and songs about how pleasant it is, it really is quite pleasant.
DANIEL HANDLER
as Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Passion
Love covers a multitude of sins.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Little Women
Love is a sickness full of woes,
All remedies refusing:
A plant that with most cutting grows,
Most barren with best using.
SAMUEL DANIEL
Hymen's Triumph
Love is a kind of warfare.
OVID
The Art of Love
No wound is worse than counterfeited love.
SOPHOCLES
Antigone
Perhaps love's greatest gift--that it is indeed unconditional--is also its greatest curse.
KRISTIN ARMSTRONG
O Magazine, Feb. 2007
So soon as this want or power [of love] is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"On Love", Essays and Letters
Falling in Love, as modern biology teaches us to believe, is nothing more than the latest, highest, and most involved exemplification, in the human race, of that almost universal selective process which Mr. Darwin has enabled us to recognise throughout the whole long series of the animal kingdom. The butterfly that circles and eddies in his aerial dance around his observant mate is endeavouring to charm her by the delicacy of his colouring, and to overcome her coyness by the display of his skill. The peacock that struts about in imperial pride under the eyes of his attentive hens, is really contributing to the future beauty and strength of his race by collecting to himself a harem through whom he hands down to posterity the valuable qualities which have gained the admiration of his mates in his own person. Mr. Wallace has shown that to be beautiful is to be efficient; and sexual selection is thus, as it were, a mere lateral form of natural selection--a survival of the fittest in the guise of mutual attractiveness and mutual adaptability, producing on the average a maximum of the best properties of the race in the resulting offspring. I need not dwell here upon this aspect of the case, because it is one with which, since the publication of the 'Descent of Man,' all the world has been sufficiently familiar.
GRANT ALLEN
"Falling in Love", Falling in Love and Other Essays