quotations about love
Love enters a man through his eyes, a woman through her ears.
POLISH PROVERB
Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"The Buried Life"
Perhaps love's greatest gift--that it is indeed unconditional--is also its greatest curse.
KRISTIN ARMSTRONG
O Magazine, Feb. 2007
Love is the power that can anchor and transform both our conflicts and our compromises, as we take firm and steady steps toward big and worthy goals. Although we've banished talk of love from our public discourse, we need to place it back where it belongs -- front and center, right alongside high standards and expectations.
KEN WAGNER
"Back to School -- New Statewide Offerings Include Love", Westerly Sun, August 31, 2016
Love made you vulnerable; if you gave your heart to another, they could leave you or die.
JOHN TWELVE HAWKS
The Traveler
The imagination of a eunuch dwells more and longer upon the material of love than that of man or woman ... supplying, so far as he can, by speculation, the place of pleasures he can no longer enjoy.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
journal, Apr. 4, 1831
Love ... Just Nature's way of getting one person to pay the bills for another person.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"For What Binds Us"
The first love disappears, but never goes. That ache becomes reconciliation.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
Love is a stream that will find its course.
JAMAICAN PROVERB
Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense.
HELEN ROWLAND
Inter-Collegiate World
For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.
GEORGE ELIOT
Daniel Deronda
That adoration which a young man gives to a woman whom he feels to be greater and better than himself, is hardly distinguishable from religious feeling. What deep and worthy love is so? whether of woman or child, or art or music. Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies, all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
Love is but a fire that is to be transmitted.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Psychoanalysis of Fire
Burning with tender love is not really an image for someone who has warmed mercury over a gentle flame. In slowness, gentleness, and hope we have the hidden force of moral perfection and of material transmutation.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Formation of the Scientific Mind
Christians see love as a vertical (love for God) and horizontal (love for fellow human beings). Just as the vertical and horizontal wood or metal come together to form a cross, so also love for God and love for fellow human beings define the whole essence of love.
FRANCIS EWHERIDO
"Love is a cross", Vanguard, November 11, 2017
Love is ... letting them flirt with the person next door, because you understand they need to feel like anything is possible.
EVA WISEMAN
"Love is ... let me count the ways you are special", The Guardian, February 14, 2016
Love is blind.
ENGLISH PROVERB
Love's fire colors once our neutral form, to blacken to eternal embers.
ELISE PUMPELLY CABOT
"Arizona"